Return to the Walled Garden
by icameherejusttosaythis
Summary: Ashana nar Vesta wakes on the Citadel after being rescued on a distant colony world by Liara T'Soni.
1. Chapter 1: Blood and Bone

Blood and Bone

**A/N: This story deals with a minor character who featured in a few chapters from my story "Little Wing." You need not have read the earlier piece to follow what's going on here, but there are probably lots of spoilers for "Little Wing." Happy Holidays to everyone out there, and hoping all goes well for you in the New Year. As always, I hope to hear from you. **

Shen was dead. That was one of the few things Ashana nar Vesta still knew for certain when she woke after surgery.

In those first days, after she was first conscious again and at last understood that her wounds would likely not kill her, Ashana would sometimes see a young turian sitting at her bedside, always reading something on a little screen in front of him. _Spirit book _he said, the first time he'd seen her awake. He gave her a name, _Varian_, and touched her hand in a way that seemed kind.

Those days—unspeakable pain, so much she thought she was drowning in a roiling ocean of her own blood, with nothing to hold onto but a raft made of jagged shards of bone. Talking to the doctors later, it might as well have been the truth. Organs, skin, muscle, all of it had been grown new in a lab next door. _Nothing but the best_, her salarian doctor told her. With a wink, he'd said, _Good as new. No. Better, because new_. And then the drugs pulled her down again into the blood ocean, where she dreamt her mouth was full of someone else's hair.

Her geth symbiote wasn't with her, when she called out to it, there wasn't a response. Normally she didn't have to call, it simply was. At her side, pacing along thought for thought with her own mind, answering so readily she'd forgotten it wasn't inborn. Ashana had never been without her. She'd always thought of her geth as female, instead of a multitude of voices that swam through her thoughts that were so much a part of her thinking mind that she almost couldn't do it without her.

But Shen was dead. She'd seen him running in the opening of the Anthill, demolition charges in each hand while a krogan charged him, another one of their team already in his hands. Ashana had watched as the krogan twisted and pulled the man's head clear, as easily as if he'd been opening a bottle. Then a wall of light, followed by dust and dark, and a watery ringing in her ears.

Shen had blown the entrance, or tried to. It hadn't saved anyone. The blast was too small to do much aside from stop, if not quite kill, the krogan and to scatter the entryway with a new layer of dust and debris. And the krogan's friends had come racing in after him, shooting anything that moved, including her.

Somehow she'd managed to run a few hundred meters down the corridor before her body had realized it was hurt. As if by some miracle, she had found someone there, as though they'd been waiting for her, and had carried her from that awful place on Esan and put her on a ship and brought her here. When she saw the turian next, she asked if it had been him.

"That was me," he said, and touched her hand again. "I had help."

She began to ask him a question, but he motioned for her to stop. He would tell her everything later, he said.

"Now rest, okay?"

#

The next day, he was still there, looking as though he hadn't moved. Perhaps he hadn't. Ashana stirred in the bed, and he turned to her.

"Any better?" he asked, but before she could answer a nurse came in to check. And a few minutes after that, the doctor came. He was a salarian, a scrawny creature, who stared at her with his giant black eyes. He had white markings around his mouth and nostrils, and yellow tips on his horns. Salarians sometimes claimed yellow spots were lucky.

"We're doing the muscle grafts today. Been growing them since you first came in. Now we have enough to fix you up. Skin's next, after that, but skin grows slower."

When he'd gone, Varian spoke to her a little about his home on Palaven. He'd grown up not in Cipritine, but in Niveris, farther north, and on the other side of the planet, where there hadn't been as much damage from the war. His mother and father had worked for years in the orbital construction business, but had retired, and finally died a few months apart from each other. He had two older sisters, and he was afraid he wasn't going to see them for a while. No money to go visit, he told her, before she could ask him why.

He had a call, and she drifted off to sleep for a while. When she woke, he was standing in the far corner of the room, talking to an asari whose face looked familiar. The doctors were just outside, and an orderly came in pushing wheeled bed. Varian and the asari came over to her, and the asari held her hand.

"Did you carry me?" she said. The asari had dark facial markings at the bridge of her nose and on her chin.

"No," she said. "I only flew the ship." She reached down and touched Ashana's hand. Her fingers were warm. "Good luck with your operation."

The asari and the turian moved off into the corner. The turian was asking, "We really can't wait a few hours to see if she comes through?" and the asari answered, "We can't."

They were wheeling Ashana out of the room now on her way to the preoperative station, past the Varian and asari. Varian said, "See you soon." He smiled. Then they were in the bright corridors of the hospital and then riding down a lift that was wide enough hold three of these rolling beds side by side. In the operating room, a human nurse injected something into a tube in her arm, and first she felt calm and then the lights went out.

#

When she woke it was night on the Presidium. She vaguely remembered having talked to the surgeon in recovery. Everything had gone well, he'd told her. Now she needed rest.

The lights were on low, and she was only in minimal pain. Through the glass, she could see people walking along the water in the Presidium. Varian was gone. She asked one of the nurses about it. He'd left before she'd gone into surgery, but before he'd gone, he'd charmed one of the nurses into taking down his extranet address.

He hadn't returned in the morning, or the following night. _He's gone_ a thought told her, and Ashana smiled because she knew her geth had returned. _Where were you? _She wondered. They had been to the collective, beyond the veil, and returned. It had been a wondrous place. They could not describe, and yet she understood. _Like here_, she thought, _at the center of everything._ And they had answered, _No. Not at all like this_.

#

There was lots of recovering to do. Four times a day, the nurses came and forced her to get out of bed to go to the loo, or bathe, or just walk from her bed to the door. In no time at all, she was strong enough that she could get up on her own, though sitting up made her muscles knot and twist. More than once the pain made her vomit.

Meanwhile her geth had sent word to the quarian embassy, and someone came to see her, an youngish man from the diplomatic corps, starched and formal, not at all the kind of person she wanted to see. Descendent of the Admiralty Board, and a useless twat as far as she was concerned, trading on reputation to get ahead.

"I understand you were wounded while scavenging on Esan," he said. _Scavenging_. She'd have grabbed his pasty throat if she could have just sat up quickly. She'd been a runner, tall for a quarian, fast and lean. And now, at twenty-two, she was a cripple. Likely she'd have a limp for all her days. A limp if she were lucky, otherwise, she'd need a medical exoskeleton to help heft her body around.

Children, too, were out of the question. Abdominal wounds and the female body did not go together. The womb itself could be regrown, but the maternal cells—she'd been born with them. There was nothing to do to about it. Of course, the doctor had told her, perhaps she could carry a labgrown embryo.

Meanwhile the diplomat, born of a father who had known the great-grandchildren of Tali'zorah vas Normandy, could barely hide the sneer, the slight closing of his big black eyes. He had no idea what things were like. _Vas_ Rannoch—his family had grabbed the name same as they'd grabbed up as much land as they could, like it belonged to them. Meanwhile some others, like Ashana nar Vesta, had to struggle for a living.

"I'm to make a report to my superiors," said Son of Admiralty, spitting the word _superiors_, as though it had no meaning to him. "If you remember anything of your experience on Esan, I'll add it to the final document."

Ashana closed her eyes. There was Shen, the too-small demolition charges in either hand, sidestepping the krogan as it charged in. Someone was shouting _Blow it! Blow it before they kill us all_, and the krogan, throwing his newest victim aside turned to attack. Then darkness and an angry, wounded krogan. Ashana looked at vas Rannoch and shook her head.

"I don't remember much," she said, "just that we were looking for a marking painted on a wall."

"What was the marking?" he asked, "Can you show me?" He held out his data pad and she drew it for him. He studied it carefully before going back to his report.

"Do you know who attacked you?" the Son of Admiralty asked.

Ashana shook her head. She described the krogan. Dark brown uniform with yellow gauntlets. Red stripe on his helmet.

"That's all?" he asked. Ashana nodded. Doing even that hurt her. "Do you know if anyone else from your team might have survived? I'll be notifying their families later today.

"No one," Ashana said. "Only me."

Son of Admiralty nodded and then reached for her hand. For a moment she thought he meant to comfort her, but he was instead feeling for the leads in her palm, where his geth might commune with hers. She withdrew her hand and told him she wasn't feeling well.

She asked him to shut the blinds before he left. "Of course," he said.

All afternoon, after physical therapy, the news played footage of a place called Pirin. The turian did not return.

#

Shen was dead. She'd known it before, but only now did she really understand it. Through the veil of the pain medication, and the itch and tearing of her body's healing, she felt it. He'd never loved her, not the way she'd wanted him to, but that didn't change what she had felt. Life did that to you, it made you fall for the wrong person.

Shen had always been about their operation. He loved their ship, he loved their crew, and in that way he'd loved her. It hadn't been the right way.

She'd known that. There'd been his _official_ mate, a young woman named Zera not much older than Ashana herself. She was dead now, too. But even Zera had mattered less to Shen than other things. Perhaps they'd both known it all along, but had seen it confirmed when they'd received a special transmission, an eyes-only for Shen. He'd come back from the comm station looking gray. "Wrap it up," he'd said, of their salvaging operation. "This is more important than old metal."

#

A quarian named Gell came to see her. He was more to her liking than Son of Admiralty. Her geth had sought him out and suggested they meet. A structural engineer, he worked down on the wards. He joked about taking her to Zakera Point, to look up at the Presidium. "When you're better," he'd said.

When he'd gone, her geth told her, _He knows the asari who saved your life. She's paying to make sure you recover_.

"Who is she?" Ashana asked.

_T'soni,_ her geth answered. _A great hero._

#

When would she be better? She asked the doctor. The salarian shrugged. She was walking now, wasn't she? Yes. But when could she leave? He touched his chin, what little chin salarians had, and shook his head. He simply couldn't say.

A few days later, during the shift change, she got out of bed, shuffled to the bathroom, and undressed to take a shower. In the mirror, she looked at her pale belly, the skin grafts weren't the same shade as the rest of her skin, and underneath, the lab-grown muscle fibers knotted and burned if she wasn't careful how she moved. She washed herself, and put on some clothes that someone from a relief agency had brought her. She took the cane she'd been using with the physical therapist, just to be sure. Walking to the nurses' station, she tapped on the desk and said to the asari who was engrossed in her notes, "May I go for a walk?"

"You can go as far as the cafeteria," the nurse answered. "It's one level down. I recommend you don't use the stairs."

Ashana went to the elevator. A crowd was already there, and she slipped in behind them. She decided to ride all the way down to the lobby instead of pushing her way back through the crowd. And once there, decided not to go to the cafeteria, but instead walk across the lobby. No one stopped her, not even as she made for the revolving doors, and stepped out into the bright light of the Presidium's early afternoon.

She was surprised by the quiet. Traffic droned overhead, but at ground level, there weren't many people out. A few stragglers seemed to be returning to their offices from a late lunch. A C-Sec cruiser flew low overhead, its lights flashing, but it moved off, up the curve of the station, and into the distance.

Ashana didn't have much money, but she found café where there were more turians than any other race and bought herself a bun filled with dextro-meat and vegetables. She sat chewing slowly, while looking out over the river that flowed through the center of the Presidium. Looking up, she saw the shadow of the Presidium pass briefly over the artificial sky. A moment later, a swarm of official vehicles went blaring past, C-Sec cruisers in formation in front of a motorcade, carrying one of the councilors and their delegation. The vehicles banked and seemed to angle up into the air, passing into a tunnel that would take them to the top of the tower.

Ashana was getting up from her table when a three-fingered hand appeared on her forearm.

"Please." It was Gell. "Sit."

Ashana did as he said, looking down at the remnants of her half-eaten bun, and then at Gell. He had paler skin than hers, more gray than brown, and amber-colored irises. He smiled at her. She thought he might be kind, and wondered if he was. Again she thought of Shen, his hands in her hair, and on her breasts as she rocked back and forth in his lap. Then she remembered he was dead.

"You're doing better," Gell said. Without her asking, he added, "Our construction business has an office up here."

Ashana smiled, while her geth hummed in her thoughts. Gell ordered something to drink, and they sat quietly. She touched his hand, and he hers, and they let their geth commune for a while, before breaking contact.

"You haven't been released from the hospital yet, have you?" Gell asked.

Ashana shook her head, and gestured toward the cane she'd used to amble this far. "I'm not yet ready for a visit to Zakera point. Not physically, anyhow."

Gell nodded and sipped the drink he'd ordered. She took his hand in hers this time. _Tell me about Liara T'Soni_, she asked him. Gell shook his head. _She took us_, his geth said. _She said we were helping the asari Councilor commit treason. _Ashana didn't understand.

"I don't know what to say," Gell told her. "I found something that belonged to T'Soni's mother," he said. "At first we didn't know what it was, except that it was an old asari artifact. We called someone at Deniri's office to send an expert."

"Did they send one?"

"They did," Gell answered. "And then a few hours later, half a dozen more. Only this time the experts had guns and a bad attitude." His geth showed her a picure of the canister as Gell had found it, and another as it had been left for him to hand over to T'Soni. The contents had been examined and carefully put back as they were, though several key objects were missing, one a unit patch for a commando outfit called The Lovers. "I passed the container on to Dr. T'Soni. Apparently it was her mother who buried it. Whatever she learned from the data storage devices sent her to where she found you."

"I guess I'm supposed to feel lucky," Ashana said. She gestured at her cane, but as she did, something seemed to tear inside her and her stomach clenched. She put both hands on the table and collapsed onto the ground.

#

Two days later, while the salarian doctor clucked his tongue disapprovingly, and the nurses fussed over her fresh bandages, Ashana stared out the window. Down below, along the watercourse, she could see the low terrace where she had enjoyed her moment of freedom.

#

Gell stayed away. According to the news broadcasts, something terrible was happening on Pirin, where a parasitic infestation was spreading among the locals, driving them mad, and then killing them. The entire colony had been abandoned. The Council was "investigating," whatever that meant, but already there was speculation that the leviathans were expanding into Alliance controlled space. Even Ashana, as apolitical as she was, could tell that wasn't good.

The tearing sensation in her stomach finally gave way to a dull itch. The nurses removed her dressings. According to them, she was as good as new, but the skin on her abdomen didn't match the rest of her body. It was pale, nearly gray, like Shen's had been. The rest of her was a dark tan, freckled here and there. The divide between the lab skin and what she considered _herself_ was marked with a little line, almost like the groove between two floor tiles, where they'd sealed her shut with a surgical laser.

"Will it ever be the same color?" she asked the nurse, a gentle asari, who never said much.

She only shook her head and said, "It's never quite the same." Drawing back her sleeve, she showed Ashana a patch on her arm that was a different shade of blue. She didn't seem to read Ashana's expression, her terror over the thought of taking her clothes off in front of someone for the first time to have them see _this_.

"How long before I can go?" she asked.

"A few days," she said and turned to leave. She'd been gone for a few minutes already when Ashana realized that when they released her she didn't have anywhere to go, not really. She couldn't go home to Rannoch yet. Not without something to show for it, other than new skin paid for by an asari war hero.

She got out of bed and shuffled out of her room. There was a lounge where some of the other patients from the unit were relaxing, some with their families, some alone. There was a drell longshoreman, who had lost both of his legs when a container had fallen on him. He had new prosthetics and was still getting used to them. Right now he was sitting, his feet nervously tapping, or perhaps twitching involuntarily against the floor.

Ashana sat down next to him. "Here," she said, and repositioned his legs. The twitching stopped.

"Thanks," he said. For a time they both sat just watching the traffic pass overhead and below.

"Does it ever rain here?" Ashana asked, with a bit of a grin. The drell turned to her.

"I wish it did," he said. He had mottled brown scales that shimmered blue in certain kinds of light, and orange and red lines around his eyes and over the top of his head. "Tamriss," he said, and held out a hand.

"Ashana." They shook. His feet sat still on the floor.

"They tell me my own skin will grow back over the top of these things," Tamriss said. "I kind of like the mechanical look." Ashana smiled. Down below on the commons, a crowd had gathered. At first it looked like a demonstration.

"I wonder what's going on down there," she said.

"Someone's always complaining about something."

The group had gathered around a public news information station, some of them were turning on private screens on their omnitools. Others were walking away, their heads lowered, still others in tears. Nearly half the group, Ashana realized, was asari.

She flipped on her own viewer and turned to Galaxy News, where a portion of the screen flashed over and over again, _DR. LIARA T'SONI, PROTHEAN EXPERT AND HERO OF THE REAPER INVASION, KILLED IN BOMB ATTACK ON OMEGA. _Ashana gasped. Tamriss looked over at her screen. He started to say something, but then went quiet. His scales lost their sheen for a moment. Ashana got to her feet and turned around. All across the lobby the news was breaking. She read it there clearly on the faces of all the staff, the families waiting. Soon it was on all the public screens. A human reporter was speaking from the scene, behind her smoke and fire rose from the upper levels of the structure that housed Afterlife.

"Details are hard to come by," the reporter was saying, "But we understand that Dr. T'Soni and several of her close associates allowed themselves to be captured by Aria T'Loak." The screen cut away to grainy footage of Liara being shoved into Afterlife by a number of armed men. The human reporter went on, "Apparently the capture was a ruse, that allowed T'Soni to smuggle a bomb into the heart of Omega. Over a dozen are reported dead, among them T'Soni. Aria T'Loak, the apparent target, suffered only minor injuries in the blast. T'Loak has survived numerous past attempts on her life over the centuries, most recently another bombing attack on one of her private shuttles nearly ten years ago." There was a pause while the human anchor asked the reporter a few standard questions. While they talked, footage of T'Soni being shoved up the steps of Afterlife played again. There she saw the turian, Varian, who had been sitting at the foot of her bed.

Ashana suddenly wanted to sit down, but stopped herself when a squad of C-Sec officers led by a lanky turian with blue facial markings stepped purposefully into the lobby, stopping at the reception desk, where one of the distraught nurses pointed vaguely in the direction of Ashana's ward.

Her first impulse was simply to run. After so many centuries spent as outcasts, quarians were still often raised to fear and avoid authority, more than they were to respect and obey it. But she couldn't trust her body to move her as quickly as she needed it to. Instead she kept her head down.

The turian was still asking questions of the receptionist. "This is the guy?" he said, apparently not for the first time. "Just look at the damned picture."

"That's him," the nurse said at length. "He hasn't been in. Not lately." The turian straightened to leave. Ashana saw her chance, and slipped around behind the reception desk, behind the nurse, who had hung her jacket her chair, providing a little concealment, as she tried to get away.

She would have made it, too. Taking the jacket with her, she slung it over her shoulders. It was big, but it made her look like she belonged. The elevator had come as though she'd summoned it from halfway across the lobby, and she was stepping aboard, when a big hand took her elbow, and almost gently said, "Far enough, kid."

#

Seven hours later, and they were still asking her the same questions. She had reconstructed the timeline of their departure from the debris field near Nearog for the ruined colony of Lorek, once known as Esan.

Had they found anyone there? What had happened to her comrades? Who had attacked them, and why? Was there a chance anyone from her ship had survived?

Ashana wanted those answers as much as they did. She told what she knew to a young looking human officer, hair shaved nearly to the scalp and no eyebrows, then a salarian, older this time, gray green face with mottled black spots over his brows, and finally to the turian with the blue facial markings. He was from an old Citadel family, had the accent for it, the bearing. Everything he did suggested generations of unflinching service to galactic security.

The human was soft. The salarian, kept circling back to the same main points. _I don't understand_, he said, _How you managed to survive, when the rest of your team didn't._ Ashana explained, again, patiently at first, then growing frustrated. Finally the turian came.

His name was Chief Superintendent Auricus, and had no tolerance for any further lies.

"I've told the truth," Ashana insisted.

"Right," Superintendent Auricus said. A high tone floated along underneath the low growl of his voice. She knew it meant something, but couldn't tell what.

"There was a turian who came to see you," Auricus said. "What was his name?"

"Varian."

"That's it. Just—Varian. No family name, no word about what system or planet."

"He said he was from Niveris."

Auricus made a note of that on a slipscreen he held in his hand. "He say anything else?"

Ashana shook her head.

"What about T'Soni?"

"What about her?"

"She was paying for your recovery," Auricus said. "Why would someone of that stature need to bother with a half-dead quarian?"

"She saved my life," Ashana answered. "Maybe she thought it wasn't worth _just _bringing me to a hospital. Maybe she wanted to ensure I survived."

"She tell you that?"

"No. It's just a guess."

"Are you aware of what she was planning?"

"What do you mean?" Ashana said. "You mean the bomb on Omega?"

Auricus leaned in close, so she could smell the awful tea the turians were always drinking on his horrible turian breath. So she could see the little knife teeth in his awful turian mouth. "Yeah," he snapped, "That's exactly what I mean."

"I never even met her," Ashana said. Auricus stood and pointed at a screen on the wall. Momentarily there appeared an image of her in her hospital bed, her abdomen nothing more than a shredded mass of blood and drains and wires. Standing next to her was Liara T'Soni. Liara was looking right at her. _Why didn't you tell me about this? _She asked her geth. They were silent. Suddenly she felt a humming run through her thoughts, a common sign that her geth were nervous or agitated.

"You met her," Auricus said. "So tell me what she was up to."

"I don't know. I don't even remember talking to her."

Her geth were whispering in her thoughts, but she couldn't quite hear them. Then, suddenly, _They argued. T'Soni and the turian. T'Soni wanted to leave you behind._ Ashana blinked. _T'Soni would have left us all to die._

"And yet she carried you onto her own vessel and transported you here, after stabilizing your condition."

"She and the turian carried me. They took turns she said."

"And the turian never mentioned anything either?" Auricus flexed his mandibles so the jaw-tusks flared out. Already angry, it made his face look downright menacing. "We found her ship," Auricus went on. "On board we found so much restricted tech and illegal weaponry we'd have had to lock her up for a century, even if she hadn't been planning to assassinate everyone on the council, starting with Matriarch Deniri." After a pause he added, "We're rounding up her network now. And I'm betting one of them is going to talk."

"Are you asking me a question?" Ashana said.

"Your time is running out," he fired back. "Tell me now and I can help you. Did you see anything while you were on board?"

"No. I nearly died."

"What about your symbiotes?"

"What?"

Auricus grabbed her by the forearm and pulled her across the table. "Am I going to have to pull them out before you let me talk to them?" Ashana shouted for him to stop, then turned toward the mirror, where she assumed someone might be watching the interrogation. Auricus let her go and took a deep breath, as if to calm down. _Don't let him ask us_, her geth said.

"They don't know anything." _Don't let him_, they said.

"Look," Auricus said. "We've got a probe. Lets us talk to your local colony. Don't make me use it."

"They lost power when I was dying," she said. "They feed of my blood sugar, same as I do."

"Fine." Auricus gestured, and one of the other C-Sec officers wheeled in a device. They found the leads in Ashana's hand, then stabbed two probes through her skin, underneath the leads, and when she began to fight them, they brought in a gurney and strapped her to it. Ashana still fought, but there was nothing she could do. Her geth fought, too, and that went better, for a while, until the frantic hum in the back of her mind faded and faded, and finally let go. The display on the probe's screen changed from one kind of static to another, and Auricus went on with the interrogation.

"Anything you care to add to your host's statements?"

The static flickered, and there was a little noise, a geth shrug. Auricus touched a button on the probe, and the static changed. The hum was back in her mind, her geth were fighting him again.

"You'll get tired of this eventually," Auricus told her geth.

_We do not tire_, her geth answered.

"Ah, it does talk." Auricus touched the button again, and again the static changed, but there was no hum. "What did you see on T'Soni's ship?" Auricus asked.

_We weren't there_.

"Don't get smart."

_It's true._ Auricus leaned toward the probe's monitor. _We returned briefly to the collective, using the communications array on Dr. T'Soni's ship. _

"I thought geth didn't leave their hosts."

_We do not. But we were—afraid. _Inside Ashana's head, her geth said,_ Forgive us._

There was a knock on the door. Auricus glanced up at the two way mirror, and then with a grunt heaved himself up and opened the door. Outside was the salarian C-Sec officer. They had a brief conversation, angry-sounding whispers, then the salarian stepped in, removed the probe, covered the little prick holes with a spray bandage, and unbuckled her from the gurney.

Ashana stood up, and he gestured for her to follow. In the vestibule stood the starchy Son of Admiralty. He offered her his hand, and when she didn't take it, he said, "Right. Come with me."

He led her down the corridor, up a flight of stairs and out a back entrance of and into a landing area. As they walked she asked him what was going on.

"C-Sec never knows when to quit when they're ahead," vas Rannoch told her. "We didn't know where you'd gone," he said, "but when they hooked you up to that machine, your geth got loose and told me to come find you."

"And you came? Just like that?"

"I didn't just come. I was ordered by our Councilor, Grand Admiral vas Idenna, himself. I'm to take you to his personal shuttle and transport you home immediately." Ashana stopped walking. Something in her abdomen itched, which meant pain wasn't far behind. She leaned hard on her cane. Vas Rannoch took her arm in his. "You may not feel important," he said, somehow unable to avoid condescending even at a moment like this, "But you are. C-Sec has stepped on some very large toes."

Up ahead was a gantry that led to the councilor's shuttle. Vas Rannoch urged her to hurry along with him. In short order they were standing on opposite sides of the hatch. Just then vas Rannoch got a call. He said, "It's the Councilor. I must go, but the crew has their instructions." He stepped away with a self-important glance, spoke briefly, and glanced back at the shuttle. "Those were _his_ orders? Specifically? I'm to—? Right. I understand. Understood." Looking back at her, vas Rannoch came up the gantry. His face had gone pale and his jaw was clenched. "New plan," he said, taking hold of her arm and pulling her out of the shuttle. From somewhere in his stiff outfit, he had produced a pistol, and now stood directing it toward the main entrance to the landing bay.

He pressed the entry console on the shuttle, and the hatch slid shut. He tapped twice on the hull, and stepped away as the maneuvering thrusters began to throttle up. Over the noise he shouted at Ashana to follow him.

Nearby was a barrier, and as they took cover behind it two rockets and several long bursts of automatic weapons fire struck the side of the shuttle. The shields took the brunt of the damage, but one of the maneuvering thrusters caught half a dozen rounds and the craft listed hard to one side, nearly flipping over before the pilot regained control. Trailing thick black smoke, the craft slowed, drifted toward the other side of the bay, and landed hard on one of the walkways to their left.

More shooting, and then there was a series of loud bangs as the shuttle's crew blew the emergency hatches. Shouting, and the sound of footsteps racing on the metal walkways. Ashana tried to raise her head to look out, but vas Rannoch grabbed her arm.

"Just wait," he said.

There was more shouting. Ashana heard Auricus shouting for them to lie face down on the ground, then the shuttle crew protesting that they were protected by diplomatic immunity, and that the quarian Councilor would have their badges.

"Now," said vas Rannoch, and he gestured for another bit of cover, not far from another shuttle, parked along the same walkway. Reaching this, they climbed down into the space underneath, and then through a hatch that led into a maintenance corridor underneath the docking bay.

"Do hurry," he said. She stumped along as best she could, using her cane.

"Why did they do that?" she asked.

"It seems C-Sec has been ordered to detain you."

"Even after the quarian Councilor sent for me?"

"Even so," vas Rannoch said.

Vas Rannoch opened another hatchway, and they stepped out onto a catwalk just underneath the Citadel's false sky. It seemed low enough that Ashana could touch it, and from here it looked almost like the stained glass she'd seen as a girl at the temples in Geryat, on Rannoch.

The wind here was blowing hard enough that it was difficult to walk against it. Vas Rannoch wasted no time, leading her to a landing platform, from where he hailed a car that flew fast and low out over Tayseri Ward. As they flew he called someone and said, _Five _minutes.

And in fact, five minutes later they landed at Elara Grace Mortuary and Memorial, where a soft-spoken salarian named Eldrin greeted them and led them down two flights of stairs, to a lab, built like a capsule made mostly out of glass or something like it, as thick as her forearm was long. They bid Ashana to step inside and Eldrin went with her. The door shut behind them, and Ashana felt a pop in her ears, as though she'd just stepped into the pressure-vessel of a ship.

Through the intercom she heard vas Rannoch asking, "What now?"

"Turn the key to the 'Safeties Off' position," Eldrin said. Vas Rannoch did something with the console. He looked up at them. "Good. Now hit the red button."

"You're sure about this?"

"Only way," Eldrin said. "Now do it."

There was a commotion in the hallway. Vas Rannoch looked over his shoulder, and wheeled around, pistol leveled at someone in the doorway. He fired twice as he pressed the button with the flat of his palm. He fired again and a bullet struck him square in the chest. There was a terrible squeal of metal on metal, a jet of blood struck the glass, and the lab lurched downward into the black.

They fell for what felt like several minutes before they were ejected out the reverse side of the Tayseri Ward arm. All around them were a multitude of little craft, shuttles, and recycling ships. Farther out, Ashana saw the shipping lanes, dotted with the bright lights of ships approaching or departing from the primary relay. About a hundred kilometers above them was a bright cross of light, the _Destiny Ascension, _which still patrolled the space immediately surrounding the Citadel.

They were adrift, no thrust, no attitude control. Ashana felt a brief moment of panic as she realized she'd traded one predicament for another. With no thrust there was no gravity, simulated or otherwise, and everything in the lab that wasn't secured began to drift around the interior. The glass walls of the pressure vessel caught the light from Widow, blinding her.

"Allow me," Eldrin said. He touched something on a console and the glass darkened somewhat, until it was dim enough to for Ashana to open her eyes again. Behind them, the Citadel was receding. Eldrin had comm channel open on his omnitool.

"Yes," he said, "We're away. I'm afraid your man didn't make it." After a pause he added, "It seems they had orders to kill on sight." He turned to Ashana. "They gave names. Likely aliases." He paused to listen again. "Yes. In ten minutes. Understood." Ashana had braced herself on a rail that projected from the ceiling. "Are you harmed?" Eldrin asked her.

She shook her head. "No more than I already was."

"Mm." He came over to her, poking her here and there with his long fingers. "Yes. It seems you're fine. Physically."

Ashana closed her eyes. She saw vas Rannoch again, the bullet punching a fist-sized hole in his back. There was the mist of blood and threads of flesh that had stuck to the capsule's exterior as he'd launched them into space. Alive one instant, dead the next. She wondered if he'd known that in helping her he would die. She closed her eyes and saw Shen.

"State of mind?" Eldrin said.

"What?"

"You just saw a man die, I can't imagine that sits well with you."

"It wasn't the first time."

"Yes. Certainly."

"Still."

Eldrin put his hand on her forehead. Salarians did it as a comforting gesture, but she pushed him away. The capsule was rotating slowly. Now the Citadel was in full view in front of her.

"I always thought my life would end here," Eldrin said, apparently for no reason, "Not that it would start here again."

"What do you mean?"

"This capsule. A dangerous specimen lab. Just recently we studied the Pirin parasite." He gestured at some lab equipment at the far end of the capsule. "This vessel is meant to be purged. Plasma kills anything inside, then the whole lab can be ejected into space. In case needed."

"And now we're trapped?"

Eldrin shook his head. "I worked for Liara T'Soni."

"She's dead now."

"Alas, yes. And they're rounding up her associates. I fear I might have met the same fate as your friend back there. There are systems in place to make sure we—Dr. T'Soni's friends—survive, even after she departed. Today, you and I are benefitting from her hard work and carefully laid plans."

Eldrin pointed up at the Citadel. Suddenly it disappeared as something passed over them. The object was large enough that Ashana didn't realize at first that it was a ship, a massive Alliance-built container transport. One of the compartments opened. Almost immediately a set of grapples deployed and pulled the capsule inside.


	2. Chapter 2: By the Fountain

I should have mentioned when originally posting this chapter that it takes place roughly two and a half to three years before the events of Little Wing. Sorry if there was any confusion.

By the Fountain

_Three Years Earlier_

_Everyone is a deckhand until they earn their collar_. Shen's first words to her, three years ago, the little speech he'd given at mess time, when she'd first boarded his ship. "Until then, you use your family name." This was the young tech to whom Ashana had been assigned on joining Shen's crew. "Once you've proven your worth," he said, "And only then, will you identify yourself by the name _Nar Vesta_."

That had been her first introduction to Shen, and Ashana had a good long while to think about it whlle she did menial kitchen work, and kept the passageways of Frame Seven, her designated area, clean and polished.

The _Vesta_ was a big ship, but living the quarters were confined to a small space on A and B decks, just below the bridge, with the rest of the ship given over to workshops, containment zones, and a morgue. Shen had taken a salvage tug and equipped it with a massive drive core, and attached an extendable drydock to the bow. It could grapple a hulk ten times its size, tow it to a stable orbit, and then envelop it in its inflatable drydock so the crew went could strip the wreck of anything valuable. The crew lived in a small area on A and B decks, with the rest of the ship taken up with workshops and storage compartments.

The _Vesta_ had been working the debris field over Palaven for some time. During the Reaper Invasion, the turians had sacrificed several hundred capital ships in the outer reaches of the system, with most of them having been destroyed in just a few hours. For nearly two hundred years, the wreckage had been orbiting undisturbed, too far out, and too expensive to bother gathering up. Now that the turians were currently building six dreadnoughts and tooling up to build a dozen more, materials were in high demand. And for every dreadnought they were constructing six cruisers, twenty frigates, and squadrons of fighter craft and carriers.

"Probably they're looking to build as many ships as what they lost," her supervisor told her that first week, as she scrubbed the rust off a power conduit.

"What for?" Ashana had asked him.

"So they can pay us," he'd told her. "Now shut up and get back to work."

#

Six months went by. Boring work for Ashana in Frame Seven, even worse in the galley, where she spent her time shelling gerriks, a turian fruit, a bit like a potato, and prickly on the outside that made up the most of their onboard diet. Her geth sang to her when she grew bored, long strings of repeating numbers, and old quarian songs from before the Morning War. The work outside the hull was more exciting, and more dangerous. Some of the wrecks were too large to grapple into the drydock in one piece and needed to be cut into sections.

One afternoon, near the end of first watch, they'd brought someone in through her frame. Med bay was just below her section. Someone had burned through his suit with a plasma torch. Dots of orange blood lay on the deck afterward, and they needed a hard scrub to come off.

A few hours later, a young woman had appeared in the hatchway, carrying something in a foil bag. Ashana moved her bucket out of the way, while the woman stepped inside and stashed something in the walk-in.

"Mek's leg," she said. "Burns went right through to the bone."

"You're saving it?" Ashana asked.

"He insisted."

Ashana nodded. A few of the other crewmembers had gathered in the corridor outside, but made way for someone who was stomping down the companionway. It was Shen, come down from the bridge and holding his cloth cap in his fist. He glared around the room, his mouth tight, as though he had bitten into something hard. He glared at everyone in the galley and the group that had gathered outside in the passage.

"They say he's going to make it," Shen stated. He sounded furious. "Better if he didn't, because I'm going to beat his ass when he's on his feet again." Another long glare at everyone all at once. "Mek wasn't stupid, but he wasn't careful either, and it cost him. He's lucky." Shen paused and gestured toward the cooler, where Mek's leg was being stored. "But we're short on the EVA team now." Another glare, and this time his gaze lighted on Ashana. "Ready to earn your collar?" he asked.

#

Within an hour of starting her next watch, Ashana was skyward, thrusting toward the wreck where work had stopped. Her job was to measure and mark sections designated for cutting, then the cutters would come in and start breaking the ship into pieces. Their target was a warship, almost unrecognizable now, burst open and bent in half, where the meltdown of a reactor had torn the ship almost apart. It was rolling and rotating, not fast, but enough so that the Vesta couldn't approach too close, and so that every few minutes she had to adjust her trajectory to maintain a visual on her designated landing site.

"Not your first time on a thruster, I see." This was her partner, Menari, another young quarian who had been doing EVA work for just a few months.

"No," Ashana said, her voice a bit strained as she concentrated. Nearly there now, only another hundred meters before she was boots-down on the hull.

"Watch yourself," Menari said. "You've got the easy job. Your suit can do most of the work for you, but these ships are full of all kinds of nasty things. Bodies, bombs. Don't touch anything you don't need to, understood?"

_Your heart rate is elevated_, her geth told her. _I know, _Ashana answered. Her geth hummed a string of numbers. It had the desired effect.

Menari was about ten meters ahead of her. She gave a signal: Landing in ten seconds. "Time to put on the brakes," she said.

They settled onto the surface of the hull. Everything was covered in a fine layer of ash. They left footprints as they walked from the landing site on the bow toward amidships, where a blast, probably the ship's reactor melting down, had torn the craft into two sections, still conjoined by two narrow pieces of framing and hull. Long scorch marks showed where the ship had taken glancing hits from a reaper cannon. Even these had burned through the hull's ablative coating, and often enough, straight through the armor underneath and into the interior of the ship.

"You're going to want to shine your light down there," Menari said. "Don't give in to the temptation. It's not worth it."

"Why not?" Ashana asked.

"Ever seen a live turian?"

Her geth reminded her of the faces of the customs agents she'd met coming through Palaven's prime orbital station. Unfriendly, and official. _It's all right that you want to look_, her geth said. _We seek data._

"Sure."

"They look about twice as scary when they're dead. Even worse after a few centuries of solar radiation, vacuum exposure and extreme cold. Not something you want etched into your mind, if you can avoid it."

Ashana made a sound. The wreck had rotated almost all the way around now. The _Vesta _had disappeared from view, but its floodlights lit the edges of the hull, casting the path outside of Ashana's headlamp in darkness. The radio crackled as they lost signal.

"We should be able to hear them again in a few minutes," Menari said.

As they came closer to amidships, there was more evident blast damage. Sections of the armor had flash-melted under fire, and solidified again in jagged fans.

"Careful," Menari said. "Metal's sharp. I've seen it cut through a hardsuit before. And watch your step. Some of these turian ships used a kind of ceramic composite armor. Your boots won't stick to it."

"What do I do if that happens?"

"Gotta walk slow," Menari said. "If one foot doesn't feel like it's set, stop and take a step back.

After a few more minutes Menari stopped and left her hand lamp hanging beside her. "Get out your can," she said. "I'll show you where to spray with the light."

Ashana indicated that she understood. The hulk had spun sunward again, and they were coming into radio contact. Ashana breathed more slowly now, glad to hear the chatter of the other teams working nearby. The cutters were already on their way. "Better hurry," Menari said.

They were done soon. A single spar, about four meters wide, held the ship together at this point. They began moving on to the next site, right at the place where the carrier had nearly broken in two. The vibration of the cutters rattled through the hull. The vibration soon turned into a shudder, then the whole hull shook.

"Separation," someone shouted over the local band.

"Yeah, we know," Menari shouted. "Work on your timing, all right?"

"On to the next?" Ashana asked.

"Yeah."

Only their path was blocked by a high wall of solidified molten metal. This is where the reactor had been, and burning hot as a sun, it had burst open and turned the surrounding material into a vapor. At the edges of the breech, where it was a little less hot, the walls of the hull had burst outward and melted, freezing again into solid blobs that were covered in a network of spiny crystals, where the vapor had coalesced into formations like the icy rime that forms on the leeward side of mountains in winter.

"This way's no good," Menari said. She studied her map on her omnitool for a moment before she went on. "Remember how I told you not to go into the ship?" Ashana agreed that she had said that. "We're going to have to take a detour. At least with what happened here, we probably won't find any bodies. I prefer to leave those for the de-mort team."

"We could jet over it," Ashana said.

"Always conserve your fuel," Menari said. "Don't fly when you can walk."

_Don't be afraid. It's only new data._

_Aren't _you_ afraid?_ Ashana wondered. Her geth answered, _Not at this moment._

They found a gap big enough for them to maneuver through with all their gear, and went inside. The compartment's walls were black with soot, and where they weren't globules of a silvery metal had pooled on the walls and frozen, sometimes in spherical blobs, sometimes in spidery shapes that seemed to be crawling over uneven sections of the walls.

The next few areas were the same, a small vestibule, perhaps leading from a service area to the engineering section, then a long gallery that had once been part of the ready deck for fighters. Pilots would have entered their ships from here, before being launched from their moorings on the exterior part of the inner hull. No fighters and no pilots now, and the only sign that anyone had ever been here was the ash that rose from the floor, and the occasional piece of recognizable equipment still sitting where it had been bolted in place.

Then they found bodies.

One pressed against the far wall of a compartment. Twenty more, seated at what had probably been a fire-control or radar station, each one a dark shape, strapped to the seat where they had died, heatblack and starving for air. Ashana stepped in to the compartment while Menari scouted the corridor up ahead. With her partner distracted, Ashana found the data cluster, and pulled out its core, a small cylinder, the size of a pen, that she slipped into a sheath on her sleeve.

And four more, floating in the companionway they would need to ascend through to reach their target. Each one was wearing a minimally armored enviro-suit with tanks of fire-retardant foam on and spray-sealant slung over their backs. Each one had a recognizable 7th Fleet patch on their shoulder. The 7th Fleet, destroyed that afternoon, and also the first to score a kill against a reaper dreadnought, had effectively ceased to exist that day in the spring of 2186. Ashana watched as Merani removed the patch from the nearest sailor and tuck it into her pocket. She said nothing.

"What do you think?" Ashana said. "Damage control team?"

"Looks like," Menari said. A bit of static rolled through Ashana's headset, and then went away. "We'll need to move them. Here."

Already she'd grabbed hold of the first one's legs and pulled him down toward Ashana. It was a tall, lanky male, like lots of turians, and thankfully he had left his flashover visor down, so Ashana couldn't see his face, though she did get a good look at the nameplate, stenciled over the center of his chest. Not that she could read it, but it sent a shock through her bowels and throat all the same. No time to dwell on it. Menari was already pushing the next one toward her. Smaller this time, probably a female, and missing most of her left arm. Ashana eased them both against the floor, where they bumped and bobbed against each other.

Two more. One, whose mouth was open as though frozen in a scream, and another who had died shielding his face from an unknowable danger, and lost his hands in the process. Ashana laid them all alongside each other as best she could, before moving on.

"Twenty thousand dead in four hours," Merani said. "Can you imagine?"

Ashana closed her eyes. They had found another way out onto the exterior of the hull. The _Vesta_ hung out in front of them, its floodlights shining down from almost two kilometers away.

"Why are they building so many ships?" Ashana asked, once they were back abovedecks again.

Merani made a sound. "I don't ask. They don't care to tell."

"But they've been building a dreadnought a year for the last decade."

"You sound like you don't care what's good for business. Let the turians worry about where they'll be pointing their guns."

"If you say so." Ashana marked the next cutline on the hull. The _Vesta _maneuvered in silently, its silvery collapsible drydock slowly unfolding to envelop the bow section of the ship.

Soon after the call came back for them to pack up and return to airlock. Shen met them on the crew deck, as they were getting out of their suits, and conveniently wearing very little else. Ashana stopped removing the upper section of her hardsuit, and waited while he stood there.

Shen was a good looking man. Tall enough that he had to stoop in the hatchways to avoid smacking his head, with a halo of thick black-gray curls that girls of Ashana's age often found irresistible. His hands were stained with yellow grease, but his coverall uniform was immaculate. He stood wiping his hands on a rag, while he asked Ashana how her first day had gone. When she gave him his answer, and yet he'd given no sign of moving away, she realized what was going on and turned her back to him. Merani gave her a look.

_He has taken to you_, her geth said. _So you say_, Ashana thought back. Sometimes you know the course that things will take, and sometimes you follow it through to the end anyhow.

"It's a small ship," he said, as she got back into her coveralls. "We have to leave some of our gentle manners by the fountain."

#

By the fountain. It was what the quarians had said during the centuries of wandering. Something that was lost and gone forever, but that you still _hoped_ to find again somewhere else even though you knew it was impossible; something that you dreamt of seeing once more, that you yearned for, and yet knew had probably never been what you imagined it would be; the thing that was, and will never be again, but that _could be_, but that likely _never_ was.

_That _was by the fountain. _By the fountain_ was _keelah sal'ai_'s desperate cousin, half on the ledge, half in the abyss. If _keelah_ got you through the hard times, _by the fountain, _was the essence of real existence. Things are not as we wish they were. _This_ is all we have. Cling to it.

The sentiment was older than the morning war, but no one used the expression any more. Not on Rannoch, not even the very old. Hearing it from Shen meant that he really was a spacer of the old breed, one who had never been able or even wanted to settle on Rannoch, once they'd made peace with the geth.

It intrigued her, and she turned around now. Shen had averted his eyes, and he had turned to go before she was done putting on her coverall.

Later, though, when that same garment lay in a pool on the floor of Shen's cabin, and the two of them lay with their limbs twined together, she wondered if Shen didn't break out the old expression for this very purpose. Staring at his face, his big eyes closed, as though in sleep but probably awake, she decided she didn't care.


	3. Chapter 3: Privateers!

Privateers!

_9 September, 2393 _

Eldrin was leaning against the far side of the compartment, his arms folded over his narrow body, his eyes half open, about as close as Ashana had ever seen the salarian come to sleeping in the four days they'd been confined to quarters, behind a hatch the crewman had sealed and then locked from the outside.

They were already two relay jumps into their journey, on their way to Ilium, and now there were odd noises coming from the ship. The captain had called for crew to brace for maneuvers, and now, six hours later they were sounding general quarters.

Eldrin was studying the locking mechanism on the door to their compartment, though he hadn't touched it yet. "I can't tell if there's an alarm," he said after a time. "We're safer in here, anyhow, unless something happens to the ship. In the meantime you should rest."

And so she'd gone to sleep, while he stood watch. A day went by this way, then two. Their ship was still maneuvering. Eldrin hacked into the ship's sensor data. Backtracking two days, he saw that they had come to dump their static charge in the magnetic field of a gas giant, when three smaller ships had approached from the planet's night side.

"Privateers," he said, and clipped the map shut.

"What do we do?" Ashana asked.

Eldrin shook his head. "I counted four ships. One frigate class vessel, and three smaller launches. The launches will be boarding parties. I suspect three squads each. They should make short work of the crew."

_He seems calm, _Ashana's geth whispered. Eldrin moved over to the closed hatch of their compartment. "Seals look to be intact," he muttered after a moment. "Can't count on it though." Turning to her he said, "Look in the lockers behind you. There should be some vacuum gear." Ashana looked. There was. "They'll try to breach the hull," he told her, "Probably at one of the airlocks, where security will expect it. Then, in two other places along the hull, probably on the cargo deck where the hull is the thinnest. And the crew quarters, where we are."

"You've done this before?"

"When I was in Special Tasks," Eldrin said. "Ugly work. Glad I survived it, frankly." He pulled out the two suits, each covered with ablative plates to stop micrometeoroids, but not enough to stop a projectile. Eldrin the suit into her arms. "Put it on," he said, "but keep the systems switched off for now. Save your power cells and your oxygen. Of course they don't have one that'll fit a salarian comfortably," he whispered to himself. Looking up he said, "The ship's accelerating again. We may lose them. But we won't know for a while."

"We could keep monitoring the data feeds," Ashana said, after a time. Eldrin shook his head.

"We're limited," he told her, "by the kinds of packets we can access at the moment. We might get away with tapping their systems for a while, but there's always the chance that some data aggregating VI will determine that someone is accessing important information from the crew deck, and send someone to look in on us." He sighed. "Check the newsfeeds. They're unrestricted. We might learns something important."

Ashana pulled up the Galaxy News feed, while her geth listened passively to the radio traffic circulating in-system, of which there was almost none. They were in the Eagle Nebula, Imir system, whose major population center was Korlus, a shithole by any measure, and the kind of place where any kind of distress call might only attract a second or even third band of pirates looking to cash in. The only major settlement nearby was a drone and mech tungsten mine, on a tiny frozen outer world, where a minimal crew of miners operated the machinery remotely. Ashana felt a pinch of dread at the bottom of her stomach.

Meanwhile all the news stories were grim, though that was somehow to be expected. It was rare for good news to make the headlines. Even so, the death toll from the bombing on Omega had reached nearly seventy. Authorities on Omega were saying they'd found Dr. T'Soni's body, which they'd had cremated, and then returned to Thessia for burial. Matriarch Deniri, though, had sworn to block the rematiraiton of the remains of a known terrorist and spymaster. The broadcast showed a clip of Deniri leaving the council chambers, while a dozen other video drones took footage and reporters shouted questions from beyond the security cordon. The public debate over that small canister of ashes was set to rage on into the next decade, the newscaster claimed.

"What did you do for Dr. T'Soni?" Ashana asked, shutting off the news.

Eldrin glanced up from his screen. "Scientific evaluations mostly," he said. He angled his screen so she could see. "Here," he said. "Pirin. She brought me samples of the parasite. I spent some time taking them apart. I'll give you the file."

The screen showed the image of a small creature that stood on eight stubby legs, had no visible eyes, and a small mouth that looked a combination between a drill and a suction cup.

"What is it?" she asked. The scale showed that the creature was only about half a millimeter in size.

"It's an extremophile," Eldrin said. "A bit like the Earth's tardigrades. Only these originate on an as yet uncharted planet. It seems they infest the leviathan, and maybe even have some kind of symbiotic relationship with them." Eldrin squinted at the image, and rotated it using his finger. "I'm beginning to suspect they might even have been engineered, possibly by their hosts, for reasons we can't imagine." He studied the image again, became lost in thought, and then returned from somewhere very far away. He said, "They reproduce asexually, and mighty quick, once they get going. When they've reached a certain critical mass, say a few hundred million individuals, something odd begins to happen. They clump together, forming a mesh-like construct, and eventually begin to blend into each other. After a few hours, they've grown into a new organism, roughly the size of your fingertip. Given enough time and biomass, they'll keep going, getting bigger and bigger until they're about this large." Here he held out his palm to illustrate. "At that point, unbounded creatures begin turning into lumps of unformed raw material that the ambulatory creatures use to build nests—for want of a better word—inside the host's body." He showed her some of the images he'd received from a mercenary named Arclight, about a month ago now. "Someone had them released onto Pirin."

"Released?"

Eldrin nodded. "Dr. T'Soni was working on a theory that Matriarch Deniri had contracted with a mercenary enterprise to introduce the parasite into the wild, where it would eventually enter into the human population."

"To what end?"

"Unclear." After a moment, Eldrin added, "I'm only the science officer. Dr. T'Soni had other associates who were closer to the Councilor. No indication as to how they've fared now that she's dead and her network is exposed."

"Why are you telling me this?"

"I might not live. In case I don't, you need to get to safety and put this information in the proper hands." He glanced at the floor and asked, "If you can find them." He copied his data for her to store on her omnitool.

Ashana nodded in thanks and began to ask, "Safe hands—?" when a shudder ran through the ship. An emergency hatch had opened at the head of their corridor. There was a group of five or six coming down it now, loud voices, shouting about setting up a defensive perimeter beyond the next corridor junction. Another shudder, and suddenly the compartment pulled to one side.

"Magnetic grapples," Eldrin said. He reached for the hatch, and after listening for almost a minute, carefully tripped the locking mechanism. The hatch slid open, revealing the corridor. The ship pulled to one side again. There was an odd sound from below decks, and then Ashana's feet left the floor for a moment.

"They're shutting down the artificial gravity," he told her. "Bold move." After a glance in both directions, he stepped out. "Passageway is clear. Button up your helmet and power your suit. We don't have long."

A horrible noise ran through the hull. _They're close_, her geth whispered. "What do we do?"

"I suspect the captain has decided not to be reasonable and surrender the ship. A brave decision given where we are in relation to safety. But you can't get to the Terminus without passing through a system in the Traverse. And you never know, maybe they'll just put you out the airlock instead of casting you adrift in the lifeboat like they promised to when they demanded surrender. Risk. Reward."

The ship shook, and there was another odd rumble underneath the floor. In another moment the gravity cut out entirely, and with her next step, Ashana bounced away from the floor and toward the ceiling, tumbled into the ceiling and rebounded into a wall. Eldrin steadied her, and together they pulled themselves down the corridor, using hatch-frames and protrusions as handholds. _Close_, her geth whispered again, and they began humming a series of numbers over and over. There was a loud bang behind them that nearly blinded her. Air was rushing over her suit, and something—a crewmember's pen, or a data pad—rushed past her faceplate and struck her shoulder. Another bang, quieter, then a third she could barely hear at all. The surge of air almost pulled her toward the sound, but then they had turned a corner in the passageway and Eldrin threw open a hatch and shoved Ashana through it, before the ship seemed to spin around her.

End over end, she tumbled striking a bulkhead and blacking out for a moment. When she came to, it was dark, and for a moment she thought she'd been blown out into space by the decompression. Then her helmet knocked against something hard. Her leg was jammed between a power conduit and the bulkhead. She bent as much as she could and tried to force her foot free. Her ankle didn't feel broken, but it did hurt, but couldn't feel it. The suit had injected her with medigel already, and begun to stiffen around the injury.

Her hand brushed up against something and she startled in the dark, and the fear somehow made her able to tear her foot loose. She listened, but there was nothing. Eldrin was gone and her geth were quiet.

"Are you there?" she thought, and there was no answer. For a moment she felt the same terror she'd known, waking from her wounds on the Citadel and sensing they were gone. Her suit was still mostly powered down, just the cool breath of the regulator on her chin, and the dim glow of the readouts along the lower rim of the helmet.

There was a little light, moving this way and that in the corridor. A man in an enviro suit. No a drone, scouting the passage. Ashana pulled up a bit of code on her omnitool that was usually good enough to disrupt visible light and infrared scanning. She aimed her antenna, opened the drone's command inputs and inserted the code.

The drone paused midflight, its external lights flickered off, and then it continued on down the passageway. Maybe it had worked. If it was a newer military-style drone, the VI might simply be running an ambush program, or continuing on a preset path, until it could diagnose itself. Best not to waste any time.

Eldrin had given her a rough schematic of the ship, including a map leading to the shuttle bay, at the far end of the cargo deck. Ashana turned on a small hand torch instead of her helmet lights. She followed the same path as the scout drone, before moving into a companionway to the lower decks of the ship.

The next level was engineering. Here she found two bodies, one in an environmental suit, and one who hadn't made it. There were lights playing on the bulkheads at the far end of the passageway, and she slipped down the ladder to the next deck before anyone could spot her.

The cargo hold was a mess. Normally, any loads too small or too sensitive to be stored in the modular containers clamped to the exterior of the ship were kept here, in crates that should have been strapped to the deck with webbing or cargo nets. The crew had deliberately cut the netting, and now everything was floating free across the hold. When the breaching team had come through, they would have had to fight their way through all the floating debris, while the crew attacked them from prepared positions.

In theory, they would have needed to. Instead the team had cut through right at the junction where the companionway met the main deck, which was protected from most of the cargo by a sliding barrier. The privateers had entered, using the barrier as cover, and making short work of the crewmen who had hidden nearby. Parts of the barrier had been shattered by small arms fire, as though there'd been a brief gun battle, but now the deck was dark and there was no other sign of anything aside from the loose crates that had broken open.

It seemed as though the attackers must have known where the barrier was.A bad sign, her geth would have said, had been able to say so. Had they left her again? Ashana pushed over the hole in the deck, its edges still glowing from the plasma torch, and tried to pick her way across the hold by following the far bulkhead.

It proved impossible. The way the ship had moved had thrown most of the larger crates into a heap there, crushing one of the boarders underneath them.

Ashana found him by the lights on his helmet, and was surprised to discover that he wasn't yet dead. A massive container had pinned the man up to his waist and he was struggling somewhat weakly to get free. When she saw he was still moving, Ashana stopped short and hid. She watched him carefully for several minutes before she realized he'd lost hold of his weapon. It floated in the empty space between them, about five meters out of her reach, and about the same distance from him. If she pushed out to get it, he would certainly see her. If she waited, he might see her anyway, and call out to his friends.

A light panned across the loose objects floating around the hold. The drone had been repaired, and was now actively looking for something, probably her. Are you there, she thought, and her geth finally answered her. _We are…here_.

Ashana took a breath and pushed free of her hiding place, and grabbed the rifle in one fluid motion.

The man had seen her now and was gesturing, perhaps trying to draw the drone's attention. She thought about shooting him, but wasn't certain how to work the rifle, and was even less sure of her ability to kill a person, especially one trapped and helpless. All the same, she landed against the containers and aimed the rifle at his head. Behind the glass of his helmet, his eyes went wide, and his mouth opened as though in a scream.

Ashana shook her head and held up two fingers, signaling he should use that band on his local radio net. The man shook his head and held up four fingers. Ashana shook her head and signaled two with her left hand. The man began to shake his head, but then she turned and aimed her rifle at the drone and pulled the trigger. The recoil nearly knocked her into an end-over-end spin, but the drone disappeared with an electrical flicker, and the man touched something on his wrist, and after a brief burst of static, she heard him groaning.

The sound of his low oxygen alarm came over the comm, as she waited for him to speak. Whereever his suit was breached, it was in a place where the auto sealer wasn't working very well. She said, "Who are you?" No answer, only more groans and alarm sounds. There were no markings on his uniform. "What 's your unit? What's the name of your ship?"

The man only groaned. "Get this off me," he muttered. She stared down at him and waited. Her geth whispered, _Your friend has slipped past the attackers and reached engineering. We must leave_.

Ashana clipped the rifle to her back and began looking for a piece of metal or a length of pipe to use as a lever. "What's your name?" she said.

"Len," he answered through gnashed teeth. Whenever Ashana touched something attached to the hull, she felt an odd vibration.

"You feel that?" she asked.

Len shook his head then said, "Yeah."

"Know what it means?"

Len shook his head. Someone had activated the scuttle program. Ashana asked her geth, Did he activate the scuttle program? _Yes. We are tracking him. There are a number of enemies between us. His chances of success are small. We need to get away._

"What's your unit?" she asked again.

"Get it off me first."

Ashana had found a length of pipe. She wedged it under the container and began trying to pry it free. The crate wasn't lodged against anything else, and in the microgravity it moved—with considerable effort—but all the same it began to move, slowly, then faster. Len's body drooped as he drifted away from the bulkhead, and Ashana grabbed him by the tubing at the back of his helmet, tilting his head so she could see his face.

"Still with me?"

He groaned, and mumbled _Yeah_, before he seemed to drift off into near-unconsciousness. His right leg was completely crushed, bent at an odd angle and then flattened so that ragged bits of flesh and bone protruded through his shattered and bent greaves. The armor of his left leg was cracked, and a thin jet of blood puffed occasionally from it. Len's suit seemed to be giving him massive doses of medication just to keep him alive.

"Come with me, and I might be able to help you," she said, pulling on him again, this time taking his sidearm from its holster on the side of his leg. The impact had crushed the weapon, but she hurled it toward the breach hole anyhow.

"You'll never make it," Len said. "My squad—" he didn't quite finish what he was saying, perhaps thinking better of what he was about to say. "Where would we go?"

"There's a shuttle coupled to the hull at the far end of the hold. The hatch should be just beyond that logjam of debris. If we can get through—"

"You won't get through," Len said. "That's what happened to me."

"We'll be more careful."

"If you say so," Len said. He tried not to scream as his leg struck a bit of debris.

Ashana pushed Len on ahead of her, through the jammed-together containers and snarled webbing. Cases of fruit, oranges from Earth, by the look of it, had spilled, burst open as the juice inside had boiled away, and then frozen solid like a constellation of planets burst open in a cataclysm. Len waved his hands to push them out of the way. There was the body of a crewman just beyond. He was wearing his emergency gear, a pistol still clutched in his dead fingers. Someone had shot him about a dozen times in the chest, neck and face. His head had nearly been severed.

They found a half dozen more crewmen, in about the same condition before they reached the hatch to the shuttle. There were no sentries posted here.

"No guard?" she asked.

"I don't know where he is," Len said. "Maybe he's patrolling." Ashana grabbed his armor by its rear plating and shoved him out into the open space, offering a big target for anyone concealed nearby. No one. No shots from behind the ample cover. No sniper uncloaking. No tech bombs or biotic attacks. Ashana followed behind Len, and pulled him through the airlock, shutting it behind them.

The shuttle was intact and unoccupied its power off. There was only one small viewport, in the cockpit. Everything else was cameras and monitors. One view showed that there were two armed men standing on the bottom of the exterior hull, checking for signs of movement.

"Your friends are still there," she said. The cabin had pressurized. She buckled Len into a seat, then pulled off his helmet. Already there were drips of blood on the floor. Where was Eldrin? she wondered. Her geth prodded the ship's data sources, but there was a sharp burst of noise, and Ashana shrunk back as if from a phantom. _Their VI is in the system. It's blocking everything._

Ashana threw Len's helmet into the airlock, then opened the outer hatch. She watched on the monitors as it careened off into the cargo hold. She shut off everything in his suit except his medical subsystems, but left her own helmet on and her life support running, just in case. Her geth worked on getting the shuttle ready to fly.

The ship lurched again, though the dampers inside the shuttle made the movement more subtle. How long do we have? she asked, and her geth answered, _Five minutes before the reactor begins melting down. We need to be far away._

There was a general evacuation order going out over one of the local channels. Ashana watched as the two men on the bottom of the hull released their magnetic boots and jumped clear. A launch passed nearby and they pulled themselves aboard before the little ship's engines flashed, and it began to draw away.

_Powering up the main drive_, her geth told her. _One minute_. Right, she thought, and had begun to take a seat in the shuttle's cockpit, when there came a burst of static, followed by Eldrin's voice.

"Could use a little help," he said. He was breathing hard.

"Where are you?" she asked.

"On the hull. I'm trying to reach the shuttle, but it appears I'll run out of time."

"We're in the shuttle, and ready to go. We'll come pick you up."

"Not enough time, I fear."

"Let me worry about that," Ashana said, and in an instant the shuttle was uncoupled from the freighter, Len behind her groaning and fighting for breath. In another instant they were out over the lower part of the ship. The drives were producing no thrust, and the heat building up within them was making the metal begin to glow. They came across a primary docking coupling, which had been cut into and then blown out. Eldrin was scurrying across the ship's exterior. Ashana pulsed the landing lights and he let go, trying to drift up to him. She opened the airlock, and he crawled into the chamber. The shuttle was accelerating before he'd even managed to close the outer hatch, burning hard, slicing past the privateers' frigate, a sleek looking ship, nearly all black. A defense turret tracked them, and there was a brief impact from an infrared laser that burned off the shuttle's outer ablative layer, and that shook the ship. Soon they were out of range, and racing toward the nearest relay.

A moment later the freighter's reactors exploded, and for several minutes they lost track of the privateers' ship altogether. Ashana wondered if Eldrin was alive inside the airlock, but allowed the shuttle to fly on for almost an hour before checking.

When she went back to open the hatch, she found him crawling down into the cabin.

"Who's this?" he asked, gesturing at Len.

"One of the privateers," she said.

Eldrin looked down at Len. "Poor boy," he said. "Only thing holding him together is his armor."

"I thought he might have some information for us."

"Yes," Eldrin said. Len's head was drooping again. Eldrin reached down and lifted his chin. "Crush syndrome." He said. Len looked up at Eldrin, gritting his teeth together. "And partial decompression." He pushed Len's head back farther. "I can make it quick, if you like."

Len shook his head, and Eldrin grabbed his face, jamming it sideways against the seat, driving his elbow into Len's jaw. "How many tours did you do with the Alliance before you decided to cash in?"

"Three," Len said through his teeth.

"And how did you end up here?" Eldrin asked. "I know you're not a pirate. Not with the gear you and your friends brought along. Who are you?"

"Doesn't matter," Len said. Eldrin cranked his elbow into Len's jaw, and this time Len really screamed. "You're just going to kill me."

Eldrin let go, rubbing his elbow as though it were sore. Len glanced up at Ashana, then at Eldrin. His eyes went wide, and Ashana realized Eldrin was holding a pistol in his hand. "I suppose you're right," he said, then raised the pistol and shot Len in the head.

In the tiny cabin, the noise from the pistol was nearly deafening. Ashana's geth sang static for nearly a minute while her ears rang.

Ashana didn't realize until later that she'd thrown her arms up over her face, and cowered, pressing her body against the bulkhead that separated the passenger cabin from the galley and cockpit. "Why?" she screamed. There wasn't much left of Len's head. His already shattered body lay slack against the restraints of the seat.

Eldrin turned to her. "You're hurt," he said. "There's a private cabin in the back. Go lie down. I'll fly the ship for a while. He held out his hand to her, and she lashed out, nearly kicking his legs out from under him. "Please," he said.

He reached down again, and using his body to shield Len's corpse from view, helped her into the back of the shuttle. She opened the seals on her enviro suit, stretched, and lay down. A medical drone checked her over, wrapped something around her ankle, and finally injected her with something that made her sleep.

#

She woke many hours later. In the cabin the blood was gone, if not the bloodstains. There were still discolored spots on the wall and ceiling, and a dark place on the floor, where the blood had pooled. Len's body was gone. Ashana found Eldrin in the cockpit, studying a sensor readout.

"There you are," he said, sounding pleased but showing no outward emotion. "It appears the privateers were unable to pursue. The freighter's meltdown seems to have damaged their ship. Lucky us. All the same, they knew our destination, so we shall have to adjust our plans."

Ashana sat down in the copilot's chair. "Where is he?" she said.

"Who?" Eldrin asked.

"Len. His name was Len. I told him I would help him."

"You did. He would have died slowly. Thanks to you he didn't."

Ashana was quiet for a long time. They had made another relay jump and were set to make another. She watched as the relay loomed out ahead of them, watched the spark of energy that reached between it and the ship, and then felt the hollow in her stomach as a flare of light blinded their sensors and they passed through oblivion to the other side.

A new field of stars, same as before and yet different. The navigation panel displayed a new set of information, new planets, a new star. There were the shipping lanes and local traffic. No sign of the cruiser, though it could easily emerge from the relay in an instant, torpedoes armed and ready to fire. She pulled up a closer view of one of the outer planets and saw a fuel depot orbiting it. And there was a mining station, its long distillation column in the clouds.

"Where is he?" she asked. "The body?"

"Out the airlock. Undignified, but necessary. He likely had tracking devices in his gear, or perhaps even implants. Better to be indelicate than unsafe." Eldrin locked the sensor package onto a freighter and accelerated until they were just behind and below it, nearly within the heatwash of the ship's drives, rendering them nearly invisible to most forms of detection.

"And where are we?"

"Ilium," Eldrin said. Some part of her thought he sounded excited. "Your friend did prove useful," he added at length.

"How so?"

"It wasn't privateers who attacked our ship," Eldrin said. He held up part of Len's armor, the housing for his hardsuit computer. "He was a mercenary, on contract to capture or kill one or both of us."

"Who wanted us dead?"

"Matriarch Deniri," Eldrin said. "The asari Councilor."


	4. Chapter 4: The War is Over, Garrus

The War is Over, Garrus

The _Vesta _didn't put in to port until nearly two years later, and only then because their mobile morgue was full. It wasn't their first run in to Palaven, where they had gone a half dozen times already to deliver their salvage to the orbital smelter that was churning out structural beams as fast as it could. Down below the L1 station, were the three geostationary drydocks, where crews were working around the clock on building six new dreadnoughts. Rumor was they would be building six more, once these were done. Using _Vesta_'s telescope, you could see the flashes from the welding lasers.

This time was different. Instead of pulling into L1 to simply offload, the _Vesta _descended to low orbit, where they docked at the orbital transfer station. An order went out before arrival that everyone was to put on a clean uniform, and on docking Ashana understood why.

She was standing in the rank directly behind Shen and the rest of the command deck crew. On the other side of the airlock, were two dozen turians, representing different branches of the military, the various colonial militias, merchant marine, and several important members of the Heirarchy. To her left was a vice admiral, and on her right was a man who said he was the Chancellor of the turian navy's fighter corps. All of them were eager to shake everyone's hand, and afterward there was a reception—the turians always having felt something of a kinship with the quarians, despite their vast cultural differences—in a gallery with a massive rank of windows on the right, all of them looking down onto the night side of Palaven.

One of the turians came up to Ashana, once the lengthy formalities were over, and put his big turian hand on her shoulder. He pointed at a particular bright spot in the northern hemisphere. "Cipritine," he said. "I do hope you're planning on enjoying a bit of our hospitality."

"It would be nice," she said. "I haven't been off ship for over a year."

"It's always nice to simply step outside, and look up and up," the man said. He smiled his turian smile. The markings on his face looked, she thought, too much like the illustrations of a devil from a book of stories she'd read as a child. The hand on her shoulder was too much. She shrugged, and it slipped off. The turian, his name escaped her, but he was in uniform, so it was likely admiral something or another, turned to face the windows. "Imagine what it must have been like," he said. "We all began somewhere, on the surface of a planet. All we could do was look up and wonder about what was _out_ here. But the more time I spend out here, the more I find myself looking down, thinking about what's going back at home. We can't let our homes become a mystery to us, don't you think?"

Ashana had stopped listening about halfway through his speech. She suspected he gave it often, and so she simply said, "Yes."

The admiral of whatever smiled, a gentle spreading of his mandibles, and baring of his teeth. It was an unnerving gesture for the uninitiated. Ashana wondered whether the war the turians had fought with humans on their first meeting might have started over something this small.

"I'm sure I'll only have a day or two," she said. "Is there anything I must see?"

"The war memorial," he said. "Everyone—everyone goes there. Say hello to Garrus for me." He patted her again, and took his leave, shuffling a little, and likely a bit drunk. As he left, he thanked her service to the families of the long dead. The hierarchy would remember.

#

A few hours later, they were on a shuttle carrying them down to the spaceport at Cipritine, still shrouded in night. The entire crew was drunk, even Shen, who usually didn't have more than a sip or two. Stepping out onto the landing pad, hot—the heat came as a real shock—and into a downpour, he grabbed her waist, and pulled her close.

"Stop," she said. "They'll see."

"I don't even care," he said. Neither did she but she worried that it was going to make things difficult. For nearly two years, Shen had kept a cabin with Lini, one of the ops chiefs, who often shared long watches with him on the command deck. They'd split up, and still got on well enough to work together, it seemed, though things were sometimes strained. Lini wasn't supposed to know about her. Not until Shen was ready to let her know.

Everyone knew, of course, about the two of them. And they didn't really seem to care, not even Lini, thought it was clear they weren't going to ever be friends.

It was late and under the rain the crew scattered quickly into the portside bars and hotels. Ashana and Shen found a room, but he was too drunk—tired, he said—to perform, so they simply lay side by side, their geth communing through the nodes on each others' wrists.

The things he had seen! Shen was in his late thirties, and it seemed he'd been everywhere. Thessia, the Citadel, Earth, most of the colonies. He'd survived the violent decompression of his vessel, while half of his comrades had died. In his memories, she watched him placing his crewmates in bags to be shipped home. At length he rolled toward her and said, "Your father's right, you know."

"What?"

"About getting involved with your ship's captain."

"Someone should have told Lini."

Shen smiled. His hair had grown shaggy in the year they'd been in space. Like most quarians, it grew in thick, springy curls that turned to frizz in humid weather, as they did now.

"It's true, though."

"Are you trying to end this?"

"No," he said, though he sounded like perhaps he was. He stretched, and they talked about other things for a while. He got up to use the shower, and Ashana fell asleep watching a turian documentary on the Relay 314 Incident. During what was left of the night, she felt Shen next to her, then they were together though it was so gentle it seemed like she was dreaming, and when she woke at dawn she was alone.

He had gone to the trouble of ordering breakfast for her, though, and left a message that said he'd been called away on _urgent ship business_. She sat on the edge of the bed, eating the smoked fish and drinking the tea that the turians loved, and about which she was considerably less convinced, while trying to reassure herself that _urgent ship business_ did not mean another girl, especially not Lini.

#

Shoreleave!

Shen had given the crew five full rotations planetside. No orders. No one to bother her, unless Shen pinged, to say he was returning to the hotel. After an hour, she hadn't heard from him, and so she had packed her things, and boarded the maglev headed for the city center, her things in a knapsack slung over her shoulder. She'd find a place to stay later.

During the ride down from orbit, she'd caught a glimpse of Cipritine, the threads of golden light from the highest towers burning up at them through the clouds, and she had seen the same buildings from much closer on final approach. Still she couldn't appreciate the scale until she was really in it. The train was full to bursting: children in school uniforms, shouting and laughing, older turians also uniform or dressed for business.

From some of the aboveground stops, Ashana caught a glimpse of some of the ruins that had been left standing, the jagged remnants of massive towers the reapers had torn to pieces. A city that had taken ages to build, torn down in a matter of a few short hours. Turians called them the spirit grounds. They drew closer and she caught a better view. A thin haze of dust hovered over the shattered walls. There was always something collapsing within the ruins, they said, and then the train passed over a tall bridge and over through the Spirit Grounds. There were cooking fires burning there, little clusters of people living under crude shelters. Some turned to watch the train pass, while others appeared not even to notice.

The children all got out at a stop marked Himeris, an expensive private school for some of the higher castes, before plunging into the depths of city center, where train disappeared into a series of tunnels. Even when they came above ground about a kilometer before the main commuter station, the daylight was crowded out by the massive structures surrounding the tracks. Ashana got off with everyone else. A thronging mass of tired looking male and female turians shuffled off the train, only to be absorbed by the many office towers and ministry buildings that surrounded the transport hub. Even then, the station's passageways were bustling, as was the plaza outside. Air traffic zipped low overhead.

The main pedestrian level was a dozen meters or so above the actual ground. Below the walkways, dark water ran through dozens of canals, the city having been built on the delta formed at the place where the Legna and Apion rivers met and collectively flowed into a wide, shallow bay. Five thousand years ago, a small group of turian fishermen had built the first settlements on a high rock outcrop surrounded by the current. The towers blocked out the light, and the passages wended their ways both around the structures' wide bases and through their lower levels. There was almost no light from above, and instead artificial lighting and the glow of advertisements replaced the day. It reminded Ashana of the pictures she'd seen of the Citadel.

After two hours of walking, she reached the water's edge. To the south stood the old harbor, the engine that had oince driven Cipritine's wealth, until space traffic had supplanted waterborne commerce. They'd torn down it nearly a thousand years ago, as the turians began seeking—and finding—their fortune beyond Palaven. Overhead, there were trails of ships entering the atmosphere, and far out over the water, a massive freighter of human design coasted at low altitude toward the northern end of the bay.

Whatever Cipritine had been once, it wasn't like that any more. The invasion had destroyed most of the old city, which by then had been torn down and rebuilt a dozen times already. Now the contstruction that ranged along the southern shore, rising along the thousand-year old terraces that had once been part of the harbor district spoke of _newness_: a new society, with new ideas, and new money. The tall residences crowded against one another like saplings struggling toward the light, only here instead of light, they reached for the coveted _views_. _Views _whose value easily translated into price per square meter. And it filled her with more than a little indignation that the _view _that one _paid _for so dearly was of Far Point island, home to Shepard's Field, the rolling meadow with its wild-growing flowers and clutches of standing stones, land that had been bought with more than money.

Just beyond Shepard's Field, on the high parapet overlooking the bay was the Vakarian Monument. It was an oddly humble memorial, a small square, ringed with trees, and overlooking Shepard's field below. Seated on the railing of the high parapet was a bronze statue of Garrus Vakarian, positioned so that he was facing away from the square and looking out over the precipice, down toward Shepard's field and the sea. His helmet was off, and placed on the stone ledge beside him, his long rifle leaned against railing, within arm's reach. The bronze was deeply weathered, by there was a small spot on his left shoulder that was polished so the metal shone through. From the images Ashana had seen of him, it seemed an accurate likeness, both as big and as small as he had been in real life, but still imposing even though seated. In turian iconography, the helmet placed to the left side of the body meant the person had gone missing in combat. Which was true.

Ten years after the invasion, Vakarian had been riding in a gunship that was shot down during a covert operation on a colony world in the Traverse. Well, one supposed he had gone missing. There were any number of conspiracy theories that suggested the Hierarchy had faked Vakarian's death both to allow the man to enjoy the remainder of his life in peace, and as a means of sidelining him from becoming more fully involved in Hierarchy politics.

Whatever else was true, it was tradition for visitors to Cipritine, in particular space-faring folk, to visit the monument, put one's arm around the statue, and whisper, _The war is over, Garrus_. The gesture was supposed to be good luck, and for nearly two hundred years, people had been coming here for the opportunity. The polished spot on the statue's left pauldron was testament to that.

That morning, perhaps because the weather was still bad, there was only one other person there, waiting for a drone to take his picture. Ashana waited her turn and took her own picture. Then, stepping away from the statue and unzipping her uniform to show what she considered an appealing, though not indecent, amount of cleavage, sent both images to Shen, thinking he might respond.

Nothing. Not even after ten minutes. And an hour later, still nothing.

A day went by. She and some of the crew had convened to discuss where Shen might have gone. Lini was there, which was reassuring, but the XO and the ops chief were both gone. Which made everyone restless. They put it to bed by drinking too much, and gorging on turian barbecue. The mix of drink and fatty protein, after months of ship's rations left most of the crew sick, and they retired to their respective shelters, only to emerge late the following morning, all looking worse for wear.

Still nothing from Shen, or the XO or ops chief. Ashana was now truly worried, and before long they were paging the comms officer, who had remained behind on the _Vesta_, and told them to fuck off for rubbing it in his face that they were living it up planetside. A few hours later they were checking with local hospitals, and then with the infirmary on the orbital transfer station.

No one had seen them.

And now Menari was missing, too. She wasn't the most sociable of the group, so no one had noticed at first. No one was even sure whether she'd been with the rest of the crew to begin with. The last anyone had seen her was during the reception. Someone suggested that maybe she'd gone to Menae, Palaven's moon, where there was a low-g retreat for people who liked to meditate.

"She doesn't seem the type," Lini said.

The crew began maintaining a watch on the central police headquarters, several of the major hotels, and the spaceport. Two more days went by this way. Finally, on their last day of shoreleave, the crew returned to the spaceport, looking to board a shuttle back to the orbital transfer station.

They passed through the ticketing office, and then on to customs, where the officials went through their gear more closely than Ashana had expected. Beyond the inspection station, a young turian in an official looking uniform ushered them all into a room off to the side, where they found Shen, the XO and the ops chief sitting at a table and looking the worse for wear.

"I'll let you tell them," the official said. She turned quickly and left, but then stopped at the door, and said, "Your service to the Hierarchy is noted, but you will not be forgiven for this."

After she'd gone everyone began shouting questions, while the XO and ops chief responded by yelling for everyone to be quiet. The noise rose to a crescendo, and finally Shen put up a hand and silenced them all. A second gesture seemed to suggest that he understood why everyone was upset over his disappearance.

"I could make a speech," he began. The more Ashana looked at his eyes, the angrier she thought he might be. "I won't do that. I'm only here to let you all know that we've been asked to leave not only the Trebia system, but Hierarchy space altogether. If you're wondering why, well, I'll tell you." He glared again, at all of them, pausing when his gaze fell on Ashana. "You'll notice that Menari is missing. She's been sent home, to Rannoch, ahead of us." He paused again and gave everyone another hard look. "It—I just can't even fathom someone—someone stealing patches off of dead turian sailors, much less selling them as goddamned memorabilia. Menari won't be flying again, with anyone. She's going home, her pilgrimage unfulfilled. I'd like all of you to think on that, next time you consider pulling dumb shit like this."

Stunned silence. When no one moved, the XO shouted, "Fall out," and everyone made for the ship.

#

Ten days later, the _Vesta _was parked in orbit near Omega. There was plenty of metal to go after around here, Shen had said, and right now they were just waiting for the right contract to come through. When Ashana's watch ended, she went up to Shen's cabin, where she found him sitting at his desk, staring at a long registry of ships that had been lost in the surrounding systems.

She sat on the edge of his bunk and waited for him to come to her, which he did, about an hour later.

"Lots of metal out there," he said again, as he had about a dozen times over the past week.

"I know," she said. He was quiet. She asked, "What will happen to Menari, now?"

He shrugged, which seemed to mean nothing good. "Depends on her family," he said. He seemed upset about something, but Ashana couldn't tell what. She reached for him and he avoided her touch.

What he meant was, _What value would a family place on a girl with an unfinished pilgrimage. _Ashana sighed and shook her head. After the quarians had finally come home after the long wandering, there had been a population boom, partly related to a loosening of sexual morals, followed by a near planet wide insistence that a woman's duty was to stay home and bear children.

In the decades following a complex system had evolved. Women were expected to complete their pilgrimage as a means of showing their worth. But once they returned, their duties were more strictly controlled. Husband, hearth, home. Children and family.

Conservative families still placed more importance on their daughters completing their pilgrimages than more relaxed ones did, because it meant they were _worth_ more in marriage. In Ashana's mother's time, it had been that a girl who came home _unfinished_, as they said, was doomed to never leave home again. You saw them, she said, looking over a wall into another family's courtyard, their heads covered and doing menial work. No one spoke of them. A visitor to the home never saw them, but for a flash of dull-colored fabric, a whisper in a corridor, foosteps without a body attached passing in another room. And those were the lucky ones. Others ended up as outcasts. Shunned by family and friends, and forced to make their way, somehow.

"At least we paid her passage home," Shen said. "She's already cost us so much, why not give that little more?"

Ashana lay back on the bed and stretched her arms. "It's stupid," she said. "But when you told me you were going away on ship business, I thought you were with her."

Shen didn't smile. He didn't lean back to kiss her the way she had expected he would. He seemed uncomfortable that she was there. He took off the cloth cap he always wore when he was on duty and threw it onto his desk. "No," he said. "They were sweating me and the other two. For three days it was jut me, a windowless room and a bunch of angry turians."

"I saw her take the patch," Ashana said. "I should have told her to stop."

"That's kind of you," Shen said. "It wasn't about the patch."

"How do you know?"

"None of the angry turians wanted to know about some damned missing insignia. They were much more worked about a data core taken from the carrier."

"What did you tell them?" Ashana asked.

"Nothing," he said. "I told them if their ship's data is really that important they can do their own salvage. So they said, 'All right,' and sent us on our way. After a while." Shen was quiet for a moment. Then he added, "And anyhow, I've been selling Seventh Fleet patches to collectors for years. The turians haven't ever bothered me about it before."

Ashana rubbed Shen's back, but he remained sitting. He said, "You know your first time on a wreck."

"I'll never forget it," she said.

"You and Menari both passed through that part of the ship, the ready deck and the CIC were both situated along the same spar. Menari swore up and down that she hadn't even been in the CIC." He got up off the bed and moved over to his terminal. A message had come in. He looked at it and called the bridge. "We've got orders. Batalla system. Departure, zero-zero-zero. All crew secure for FTL run."

An alarm sounded in the ship, and not long after there was a steady hum rolling through the hull.

When he turned around, Shen looked angry. "If I weren't already short-handed, I'd leave you here, too."

Ashana sat up. "What? Why?"

"I know it was you that took the data core. I don't know why you didn't tell me about it, or why the turians want it back, but I know you have it."

Ashana didn't say anything. It was true. She had taken it. "And if I give it back?"

Shen said, "I knew it was you, even when they were sweating us. I decided to keep it quiet. Because I—I care about you. But you screwed it all up, didn't you? I want you to know that next time we put into port, you're off the ship. Do you understand?"

Ashana began to say something, but Shen glared and that silenced her. He opened the hatch to his quarters.

"Get out," he said.


	5. Chapter 5: Sell Your Lives Dearly

Sell Your Lives Dearly

10 September, 2393/ 2 April, 2186

Eldrin was listening. Twelve hours separated the mass relay from local traffic over Nos Astra, he told her. They had nothing but time. Ashana was quiet. A light on the control panel was pulsing at odd intervals, and she'd fixed on it, not noticing for a moment that it was just their rangefinder, tracking the object, a tumbling long-period asteroid.

"Do you still have it?" he asked.

Ashana shook her head. "The physical object is gone," she said. "I have the data. But I wiped the core the night I brought it aboard the _Vesta_. Stripped it, and dropped it into the slag chute."

"But you have the data?" Eldrin said.

She did. He seemed excited. Ashana kept quiet for a moment, then said, "Would you say that we're more, or less, without our bodies?" she asked.

"I don't understand."

"If you could put—_you—_into data storage," she said. "While your organic body died, would you be more, or less than you were?"

Eldrin shrugged. "Ask your geth."

"I have," Ashana said. "They rather like having bodies. They call them discrete units. Geth who live without bodies are sometimes called indescrete. Some geth have tried to take their hosts with them, when the body dies. It's never gone well."

"I don't quite see your point."

"You don't want to know what's there," Ashana told him. "It's nothing but old shades of the long dead."

"Try me," he said.

So she did. Or, better, she showed him what she thought he wanted to see. She held out her hands and flipped up a holographic map. There was the Batalla Prime relay, and there, just off the main approach vector, and still some distance out, the bulk of the turian fleet, still coming out of a hard burn, still bleeding off energy, but not too much, getting ready to close with an attacker. And here they came. A dozen ships at first, that drove hard at the main body of the turian forces. They absorbed a terrible amount of fire, before one ship finally succumbed, its shields giving out and its armor shattering.

By then the vanguard had split the main turian force in two, destroying six cruisers and a dreadnought in the process. Two of them in close combat. The display flickered, as the relay spun up, interfering with the sensors.

Then the main reaper force arrived. So many it temporarily overwhelmed the networked sensors of the turian's seventh fleet. The display grayed out, then clusters of reaper ships began appearing. Dreadnoughts and destroyers at the front, closing quickly, and firing their main guns, at nothing in particular, using the cooling jets of metal as a means of limiting attack and approach vectors for incoming fighters.

And there the fighters came, getting in close, and disappearing from the scopes as they did, dozens at a time, as drones and point defense guns took them down. Ashana paused to show Eldrin video from the squadrons attached to the carrier where she'd found the data core. She'd separated the visual from the sound. There was no need to hear what was happening.

They fighers were all destroyed. A foregone conclusion. They raced in all the same, their pilots following their mission to the letter, knowing already what it meant. _Don't worry_, one of the pilots was saying to his weapons operator. _We'll be done soon_.

Then the battle seemed to stagnate. The reapers stopped their advance and banked hard. When she'd first seen it, it had taken her several viewings to realize that they were maneuvering to avoid the debris from the first wave of ships they'd destroyed.

Eldrin watched, transfixed.

The reaper fleet had made its turn, and now came at the turians sidelong. The turians had anticipated this, and scattered their capital ships, leaving a small, sacrificial contingent behind, frigates and corvettes, that locked onto the destroyer class reapers and accelerated to FTL, trying to ram them. Two hit, another seven missed, most of those that did being torn apart in the crossfire. The three surviving vessels turned and accelerated again, burning hard enough to kill their crews, and in fact, each ship was, by then, being remotely controlled from the CIC of the _Pericles_, the carrier where Ashana had found the data drive.

These last three ships, guided by other hands, closed with the nearest enemy vessel, and blew their reactors, heavily damaging two, and destroying outright a number of smaller craft.

The remaining carriers launched their fighters, then drove on toward the center of the reaper fleet. The _Pericles _took heavy damage, its reactor overloading, the ship drifted, helpless, but continuing to remote pilot—or scuttle—a number of ships that had been boarded by enemy troops, or whose command deck officers had been incapacitated or killed, yet were still spaceworthy enough to use in suicide attacks.

Then the meltdown took hold, raditation killing everyone, even the ones wearing protective gear. A Harbinger-class dreadnought slipped past them, before turning to fire a dozen blasts from its cannon. The display shut down. There was some surviving video of the hull breaches, but Ashana didn't show it to Eldrin. And for her part, she didn't need to see it. She'd already been there, and knew what the reaper had done. She'd seen the CIC crew, melted into their seats on the command deck. Their hands sealed to the control panels, the soles of their boots bonded to the deck.

She shut down the interface. Eldrin was staring solemnly at the space where the image had hung before him. "Nasty business," he said. "Even so, they lasted nearly six hours before being wiped out. The human Second Fleet at Arcturus was sacrificed in similar fashion, and they only held out for seventy-three minutes. Not an entirely comparable situation, but impressive all the same."

Ashana admitted it was, then leaned back in the copilot's chair and pretended to fall asleep.

#

She wasn't asleep, of course. There was no way to rest, having watched what she had just watched so many times. To Eldrin it was all an abstraction—numbers and symbols moving from one place to another, some disappearing, others continuing on.

But Ashana knew. The data without the body—the spirits, the _ghosts_—she knew them all too well. Here was closed circuit footage of marines drilling on the hangar deck, about ten hours before the attack. When the reapers came, they would all be ordered back to their bunks, where there was nothing for them but to do but wait, and when the time came, to die. That wasn't an abstraction. Those were real faces, people with names and families and a good deal more than that.

Ashana had watched them donning their emergency gear. Not all the bunks were full. She imagined some of them had been ordered to work on damage control. But most were there, strapped in tight, with nothing to do. Some tried talking—she couldn't hear them, but their mouths were moving. Others tried to read. One young female watched a holovid of a young family hiking up a mountain trail. Seventy times, eighty. Ashana lost count, then the compartment split open and needles of white-hot metal shot through the darkness and everyone died.

There were thousands of such files, and even more still images. Sometimes she sifted through them when she couldn't sleep. Not that it helped her rest.

Right now she was watching a group of young male and female turians file into a room and taking seats in a narrow compartment. The arrangement of the seating, and the age of the people eagerly sitting down would have suggested university students, had the young men and women not been dressed in flight armor, and the lecturer's stand replaced by a holographic tactical display.

An older turian stepped toward dais, and quickly began assigning targets by squadron and tactical group. His audience absorbed the information, their faces betraying little emotion, until someone at the back asked why there were no rendezvous coordinates. The officer running the briefing, and who at that moment was forward to explain something to a pilot in the front row, stood suddenly, as though he'd been yanked upright by an invisible thread. He blinked and his mandibles flicked and flexed. When he spoke, his voice was calm, as though he had rehearsed what he was about to say carefully, in front of a mirror, speaking it aloud until he could get all the way through without allowing his voice to waver. He looked directly at the pilot, a flight lieutenant, Ashana could tell, from the single inverted chevron on the shoulder of his green flight armor.

"Lieutenant, we are defending Palaven. In a thousand generations, no enemy has set foot on the surface of our homeworld, and as long as I am alive that will continue to be so." A murmur went through the room. The commander paused. There was absolute silence from the pilots now and he continued, "Once you have made your initial runs—and provided you survive them—you will continue to seek targets of opportunity until you have depleted your weapons stores and your fuel."

The pilot in the back of the room twitched, and began to speak.

"Future generations will remember your service, lieutenant," the commander looked around the room. There was the noise of the carrier's big railguns opening fire. When there was a pause, he shouted, "Now, get out there and sell your lives dearly."


	6. Chapter 6: The Door in the Floor

**A/N: **Dear Readers, fair warning: this chapter is a bit grim, and for those of you familiar with my other stories, I don't say this lightly. Anyhow, I'm aware of it, and I think that Ashana's tale is in need of a course correction (at this late stage in the game; I think there are probably only one or two chapters left in this particular piece). Anyhow, if you find reading this a big of a slog, be advised that I'm aware, and am looking for better solutions. I would also be happy to hear any suggestions you may have. Put them in the comments section or in a PM if you like.

The Door in the Floor

12 September, 2393

Eldrin was shaking her arm. "You all right?" he said.

"I—what?" Ashana sat up, looking at the viewscreen, where Ilium loomed so close that only part of the southern hemisphere was visible. Nos Astra, a vast, glowing city, was coming up on the left, as it slowly revolved toward the night side.

"You sounded like you were crying in your sleep," Eldrin said.

"I wasn't asleep," Ashana told him. She looked again at the display. They were in local traffic now. Ships passed in long streams down toward the planet's surface. They were about a kilometer behind a freighter that had just scraped across the upper layers of the ionosphere, leaving its first fiery contrail. In another second, they struck the atmosphere with a hard shudder that passed through the hull, but that didn't transfer much to the acceleration couches. "What's our plan?" she asked.

"Two ideas," Eldrin said, "both of them risky. She nodded, and he said, "We could try to sell the shuttle. The funds would come in handy."

"But there would be a traceable record," Ashana said. Eldrin nodded.

"Or we could declare an in-flight emergency and punch out at high altitude. We have sufficient escape gear, and planetary defenses would shoot the shuttle down before the wreckage could harm anyone."

"But no money," Ashana said.

"Yes."

"We could get split up."

"I'm less worried about that. I'm afraid we'll have to part ways here anyhow."

Ashana nodded. "Might as well get on with it then."

"As you wish."

While Ashana struggled to put on her bailout gear, Eldrin coded a distress call. The shuttle was bumping through high level winds now, and when he blew the outer and inner hatch, Ashana was nearly sucked out. He caught her, and shouted into the radio, "Ready?"

She gave a thumbs-up signal, and he pulled her along behind him.

"Right," he said. "This is where I leave you. Good luck."

He disappeared through the hole. She waited about twenty seconds—perhaps as many as fifty kilometers worth of ground distance—then let herself drop.

#

The shuttle flew on for another minute or so before it began to tumble out of control, falling away from the traffic pattern and being caught up in the defense grid. A missile lit up on the surface, and rising fast, caught the shuttle amidships, splitting it into two rapidly disintegrating halves. Ashana fell, tumbling slowly, end over end, as she watched the burning wreckage being struck by additional missiles, until there was almost nothing left.

No sign of Eldrin. If he made it, she wouldn't see him again. Her geth kept her apprised of her current airspeed and altitude.

At ten thousand meters a small chute deployed to stabilize her, and now Nos Astra reared up before her, its glimmering streams of traffic, its glowing buildings. Light from the city scattered through ice crystals that had formed on the faceplate of her helmet. The sun was disappearing on the eastern horizon, and then her main rescue parachutes deployed, jerking her back and limbs, and tearing at her groin and hips and shoulders.

The pain was terrible, and she thought she might pass out. Her body dangled from the shock cords as the chute slowly rotated through a wide circle and then again. The main parachutes cut away at a thousand meters and a smaller, steerable airfoil opened.

She had somehow fallen through all the low-level air traffic, including a vector that was full of densely-spaced freighters that were accelerating to orbit. The lower city rose up to meet her, her in-helmet HUD displayed her continuously shrinking altitude. A hard updraft from one of the taller buildings pulled her sideways and she nearly stalled out and crashed, before regaining control.

And then the ground rose up to meet her. There was a painful jolt in her groin, as the chute snagged on tree branches. She found herself dangling a meter aboveground and she cut free of her parachute, letting the shock cords dangle. She fell into the dark, landing with a sharp knot of pain in her bad ankle, and she rolled onto the ground, wailing, and clawing at the dirt, before she could raise herself back onto her feet. She ditched her suit but kept her harness. The chute swirled overhead, its white and orange panels catching the breeze. Then she saw that a police cruiser had broken from a nearby stream of traffic to investigate.

Ashana moved quickly away, into the space between the pediments of buildings. Ilium was a hot planet, and the heat down at ground level was nearly unbearable. The city had originally been built atop a series of low mountains that would allow for taller buildings.

The reapers had hit Ilum as they had every where else, though they had initially suffered heavy losses here, the residents of Ilium having invested in several thousand thermonuclear weapons, which they used to annihilate the incoming flotilla of lightly armored troop carriers. The reapers had, after that initial attack, moved in with their capital ships, and begun blasting away at the city.

When the rebuilding began, they hadn't even bothered clearing away the rubble, but instead just dumped it into the valleys between buildings, where centuries of heat and rain had ground the rubble to powder that served as topsoil for a multilayered forest that grew there. The vegetation that grew in the gaps between the buildings had lobe-like leaves that oozed sticky sap.

_The vehicle is searching for our heat signature, but it is looking in the wrong direction_, her geth told her.

From behind there was a bit of small arms fire. Perhaps they'd seen something, or maybe they were just trying to flush something out. Ashana scanned up ahead, where dark shapes were moving through the undergrowth.

What are they shooting at? she wondered. _Ferals_, her geth answered.

She needed to get out of there. There were dangerous animals that lived in this part of the city, varren, and other creatures she'd only ever seen in books. She'd stories about what happened down here at the lowest levels of Ilium, but the stories of feral asari who sharpened their teeth and hunted anything unlucky enough to end up down here with their bare hands seemed a bit hard to believe.

Until now, as she slipped forward to what was the corner of the pediment of one of the two kilometer tall buildings that appeared to grow up out of the forest floor. She was vaguely aware of something her geth had marked and was tracking as it came through the forest.

A hoot went up through the forest that was repeated nearly five hundred meters away. Ashana ran toward the nearest wall and began looking for something to climb. There was another howl, and another. There were no doorways or hatches or even drainage pipes for her to climb into and hide, just bare walls that offered few handholds. More howls rose from the surrounding trees.

_I count close to thirty_, her geth said. _We need get out of here_. How? Ashana thought.

_Climb the wall_.

Ashana looked for a better place to ascend, but there was no way up. So instead she found a suitable tree and began climbing. It was a bad decision, and she knew it, but what else could she do? Anyone chasing her would likely climb better than she did, and if they didn't, there were other ways of getting her down. None of them ended well for her.

Her only hope was that the tree was tall enough that she could reach the top of the pediment, where she might be able to find a way up and into the building. Likely there would be defense turrets to keep the ferals off, but she could hack them to defend her, if she needed them to.

And so she continued on, shifting to the next tree over, when she began to feel the vibrations of someone coming up after her. The tree was tall, fifty meters high, or more, and whoever was coming after her was a fast climber, but they were wary, too, and when the police cruiser came back and began shooting at something nearby, her pursuer seemed to drop down. The police ship hovered for a moment, its turret tracking something else that wasn't her, fired a few more bursts and it was starting to move away when the bright trail of a rocket swept past, from somewhere on the pediment above.

The rocket struck the police ship just aft of the cockpit, leaving a gaping hole, that filled with black smoke and burning fuel. Ashana watched as it began to rotate, not making a full revolution before it slammed into the trees about a hundred meters away. The detonation of it exploding roared through her body, and she nearly lost her grip on the tree as it swayed in the blast.

Down below the hoots began again, moving off toward the ship, where easier meat could be found.

She climbed higher, eventually finding a place on the wall where the tree branches seemed to have merged with the wall. In another half an hour she was atop the pediment, from where she could see smoke still rising from the crashed police gunship. There was no sign of who had shot it down, aside from the treetops and the turrets that had gone back into standby mode, waiting for something to disturb their mechanical rest.

The turrets were spaced every twenty meters, some carried rocket launchers, and some had cannons, and as she was approaching them, weapons ports swiveled in the opposite direction and began firing at something at the far corner of the pediment. She couldn't see what it was, but at least it made it easy for her to hack the nearest one, allowing her to slip past as the firefight grew more intense.

Beyond the turrets was a drainage channel, and at the far end of it she found a long staircase, exposed to the weather but unobserved by the turrets that climbed up another hundred meters, winding around one of the low cornices of the building, and into the forest of pilings that held up the massive tower. Roosting birds were everywhere, and some swooped low at her, despite the darkness.

Ashana climbed higher still and found a ladder, poorly maintained and again exposed to the wind that she climbed until she had reached a sheltered platform that concealed a hatchway into the building's drainage system.

From there it was difficult climb to the hallways of the building's lowest levels, where a handful of very ill looking asari lay sweltering in the heat of Ilium's dense lower atmosphere. The hallways were narrow and poorly lit. Some housed open latrines that seemed to have been built to replace non-functional plumbing. Occasionally she saw the occasional human or batarian huddled amongst the more numerous asari.

No quarians. No turians. No salarians. No Eldrin.

Ashana wondered what might have happened to him, whether he had survived the jump, or, more accurately whether he had survived the landing. So much could have gone wrong. His rescue gear's VI could have decided to open his main chutes just as he was falling past a large ship, tearing the life-saving fabric away, or deflating the canopy before it could slow him down. High winds around the tops of towers could have driven him into the ground. He could have landed on top of one of the towers, or snagged on a high cornice, or simply landed wrong, or become ensared in a tree, and stranded high above ground. At the very least, he was likely dozens of kilometers away from her.

A hand reached for hers, and Ashana kept walking, quick as she could. There had to be a lift somewhere that could carry her out of this mess. But then she realized she had nowhere to go. She'd been wearing the uniform from the ship she and Eldrin had boarded for nearly a week now, and now it was covered with stains and filth from the forest floor, and with blood. Who knew when that had got on there. She carried a little money with her, on a credit chit. It was untraceable but it wasn't going to get her far. It probably wouldn't have bought passage on a freighter to go home. At the most it might have bought her some new clothes.

Ilium was an asari world, and a chaotic and indifferent one at that. Their economic power meant that the cost of living here was already high. Add to it that this was where the asari who didn't fit in came to get away from their old lives, or from debt collection, or the regulations that prevented them from getting what they felt entitled to. Everything was for sale, goods, services, sex, servitude. The hotel Azure, situated on the top floors of one of the highest towers on the planet, was known across the galaxy as a high-end brothel.

But that was up there. She was _down here_, and searching desperately for a way up. She hadn't given much thought to how someone might respond to a quarian in the lower-level alienage. The heat was near unbearable, and most of the people she saw, on that lowest level in particular, were old—or ill—and not moving around much.

The more she wandered from corridor to corridor, the more Ashana realized that this level didn't seem to be connected to any of the others.

She felt another filthy hand on her wrist. Maybe it was the same one. _Water_, said a voice, and she looked around. There was nothing nearby, so she shook the hand loose and went searching. Down the hallway was a slop sink, and she found a small canister, filled it and returned to where she thought the person who had asked might be, but they weren't there.

Her geth were no help. _We didn't hear the voice, _it said.

The floor of the place was slick with grime, and the lights flickered. Ashana's abdominal muscles itched, then went into spasm. She had to lean over in order to get them to stop.

Down here even the air was wet. The walls were slick with damp, and looking off into the distance now, Ashana saw that a haze hid the far end of the corridor from view. She went back the way she'd come, wondering if she should first find a weapon. There were more people here, three skin and bones asari who sat on the floor in filthy white robes, looking at nothing. Someone called out again for water, perhaps the same person as before, and Ashana sped toward the voice.

She found a body pressed into the frame of a doorway, its hands hanging slack at its sides, its face expressionless, one of its eyes wide open, the other partially closed. Ashana felt someone standing behind her.

"She's gone," the person said. Ashana turned to find one of the filthy asari, her robes hanging from her illness ravaged body. "Or nearly, anyhow."

Ashana said, "But I heard someone calling for water."

"Don't let it fool you," the asari said. "Sometimes our last thoughts rattle on a little longer than the rest of us." The asari took the water from Ashana, and said, "We'll make use of this," she said, taking the water from Ashana's hand, and shuffled back to her companions.

"How do I get out of here?" she asked.

"Only door here is in the floor," she said. "That's where that one is going." The asari looked back at her and shook her head. "We get dumped here, from the hospitals in the middle. I'm not sure if there's a way back _up_."

Ashana filled her own water reservoir at the slop sink. She marked it as a waypoint, and then began searching. To whatever purpose this place had once been built, now it was an endless series of corridors and large galleries, with dead-end rooms without windows and no light that stank of excrement and death. There were gaping holes in the floor from which rose the same terrible stench. Doors in the floor.

There had to be a way in. The bodies weren't arriving by magic. Ashana kept searching mapping the outer perimeter of the building. Twice she encountered wild animals, and once a feral asari that had somehow gained entry. The animals fled after a blast of noise from her omni tool, but the asari had needed more encouragement to stay away, a massive shock that left her body twitching on the floor, while Ashana backed away.

She had left the asari alive, which proved a mistake. An hour later, her geth had warned her that she was being stalked again, and she'd been forced to kill the feral with a blast of plasma.

It had been two days, now, and every now and then she saw new asari, here and there an ancient batarian or human. They shuffled along. The three companions she'd encountered on her first day were all gone now, into the pits below probably. Someone, or something, was carrying them off. Perhaps it was the animals or feral asari. Perhaps there were machines, or the other dying people dragged them off to the pits. She heard a groan pass through the structure, and then again a few hours later, closer this time—close enough that when she hurried, she saw what had made it: an elevator had opened its doors, where a small group of people were being herded out by a group of of drones, each equipped with shock gear.

Sick, old, maybe one or two who were just hungry and unwanted. They all stumbled out of the lift and onto the concrete floor worn smooth by thousands upon thousands of similar feet.

Ashana hacked one of the drones to attack the other. The two machines turned to square off with one another, but then stopped, and began searching the area. The people on the platform, there were about fifty of them, perhaps not quite that many, began to panic, running whichever way they could, some trying to slip back onto the lift. The drones began firing bolts of electricity, and in an instant the air was filled with the scent of scorched flesh. Ashana tried to burn the drones with plasma, but the path wasn't clear and she hit an old asari, who screamed as the lower half of her body burned away. More bolts from the drones, and in another instant the elevator's passengers had all been subdued. Some were dead, but most groaned and crawled away as best they could. The drones meanwhile backed into the elevator's open compartment, their weapons pointing out and watching for sudden threats.

Ashana decided not to wait and see what might come down the shaft the next time, and instead began climbing to see if she could find an exit. She had her minifabricator print a set of four clamps that turned her feet and hands in to claws that could fit perfectly into the tracks of the elevator system, and one-directional friction surfaces that would enable her to ascend without having to worry about sliding back down.

The climb was slow, because of her stomach and her bad ankle. Below her the shaft extended down into the pediment, and a hot wind carried the stench upward making her dizzy as she climbed. For a time she encountered no other levels, or doorways, or anything else to help her mark her progress. Up above, there were a set of indentations in the wall, but they were perhaps as much as fifty meters above her.

And then the wind from below stopped. She almost didn't notice at first the cooler air that pressed down on her from above. But then the rushing current became too much to ignore and she felt a hum in the track. The elevator was on its way down again. She hurried her climb, trying to reach the spot still some thirty meters above, where she could slip past the elevator.

The wind from above grew stronger, and soon drops of water were falling from above. She wasn't going to make it.

There was a light on the bottom of the lift, a rotating yellow beam that at first began as a little glimmer in the hot air. Now it swirled overhead. She had to climb down, but the clamps were only meant to go one way.

It was only a hundred meters above her now, its motors whirring so that the rails shook. Ashana did the only thing she could think to do. She disengaged the clamps, flipped all but one of them in the opposite direction and let the ground drop out from underneath her.

She slid, the clamps sliding like water running off stone, as the whirling light closed in from above, closer and closer until she thought it might overtake her. And when it nearly had, her geth gave her an idea. _Clip on, _it said. _Use your harness, _and so she had simply reached out and hooked herself to the bottom of the cage, before she pulled herself entirely free of the rail and let her body.

Voices above her, and the precise footsteps of soldiers clearing the room outside, someone giving orders to split up, while others were told to stay behind and guard the elevator.

Ashana dangled from her cord. Down below, the darkness seemed to have a shape, the shape of bones, and of death, rags of ancient clothing twitching in little currents of air. Then there were sounds, vermin crawling, tearing at bodies.

The bottom of the lift was criss-crossed with bracing, easy enough for her to climb up and tie herself on, and robust enough to hide her from a cursory search, in case the soldiers decided to check the bottom for passengers. It was just a matter of moving quietly enough. She had begun planting her arms and legs into a solid position, when there was a lurch and several bursts from automatic weapons.

Someone named Meera was down, maybe she was dead. Incoming gunfire struck near the elevator. The commander was shouting for everyone to _Hold them here_, before more shooting drowned out the other voices.

Another soldier was down, someone said, coldly now. Dead, this time. _We'll have to leave her_, and then an unnerving roar from the antechamber outside the lift entrance.

Extended bursts of small arms fire, and the sound of footsteps retreating onto the lift's metal floor. Squad Two was pinned down on the other side of the gallery and was falling back to something called the wet exit. _Keep them off the elevator _the commander shouted, then _Go! Go! _Then a scream, someone shouted _Godess _and there was a terrible detonation that blew out half of the elevator's floor, sending it crashing into the shaft below. Ashana, thoroughly deaf from the blast, imagined the metal landing with a wet thud in all the rotting bodies.

Amidst the commotion, she didn't notice that the elevator had begun rising. One of the climbers had been damaged, and so it moved slowly, giving her time to see something standing in the darkness of the gallery, a tall creature, no different in size from a quarian or a human or an asari, except that its skin was gray-green, and through its ragged clothing two little nodes shone blue in the dark, and so did its irises.

The creature had stooped over to pick up one of the asari's weapons, but it stood again and tilted its head to inspect Ashana with something like curiosity as the elevator climbed away. Her geth played a string of numbers, then static as the creature examined her. The floor of the gallery held at least a squad of dead asari, and an equal or greater number of dead creatures, their lights gone out, like the one remaining that stood watching her.

#

The elevator climbed on. There were no more voices or creatures. The thing she'd seen didn't attempt to follow them up the shaft. Over the noise, Ashana eventually heard moaning, and someone muttering the word _fuck_. It might have been two different voices. Blood was leaking through a shrapnel hole in the floor. Ashana sent her drone to inspect, and spotted two asari, one with a projectile wound in her belly, whose skin had gone pale gray from blood loss, and a second who was missing parts of both legs. Neither one was visibly armed, though many asari were just as dangerous fighting barehanded as they were with standard weapons. Ashana climbed up for a better look.

The asari with the belly wound recoiled, but when Ashana bent low over her and said, "Let me help you," she relaxed.

The asari swallowed hard. There was a third body in the elevator, behind Ashana, another commando, who was missing most of her head, a bloody wound leaving part of her tongue and teeth exposed. "Help Minna first," the asari said. "She might still make it."

Minna looked about as bad as the other one. She lay on the floor, her armor torn to pieces, and ragged strips of flesh and bone splayed out on the floor like the heads of two gore soaked mops. She groaned as Ashana knelt beside her.

"What were those things?" Ashana asked. "Down below."

Minna stared at her, blankly. The one with the belly wound said, "We don't know what they are, but we call them emissaries." She coughed, and when she did, a little blood came with it. "They've been seeing them for over a hundred years now. We leave the Toms for them."

"Toms?"

"Poor, unloved, unwanted. All the old, and sick, all the ones who come here without families, the ones who have nowhere left to go. They come there. Call it Tom-All-Alone's. Toms for short."

"And why do they get sent down there?"

"Ones that are too sick, too poor to be of any more use. Come down here, to die."

Ashana's drone had sealed off most of the larger bleeders in Minna's legs, but she still probably wasn't going to survive. Even so, she applied medigel to the stumps. She might make it. She turned to the other one, who still hadn't said her name. "What do the emissaries do with the ones you send down?"

"Feed on them maybe," the asari said. "They run with the ferals. Maybe they _run_ the ferals, but no one knows." Behind Ashana, Minna groaned, though she wasn't sure if that was a good sign or not. The other commando's expression changed, and she whispered, "Goddess," to herself. Then nothing, except a little tilt of her head and an opening of her pupils, and then she was gone. Ashana turned to check on Minna. She was dead, too. Blood was still pooling on the floor underneath her. She scanned again and found the woman had suffered a brain hemorrhage from the blast.

The elevator, meanwhile, had continued on, up its track. Ashana opened the emergency hatch and climbed out onto the roof and shut the hatch behind her. The levels here were packed densely together and the interior of the shaft was covered with what looked like soot-covered handprints, made by people moving along narrow ledges that ringed the levels.

Up above, Ashana saw a ceiling. It wasn't the top of the tower but likely it held the embarkation point for the commandos and whatever unfortunates ended up down below. She stopped the three remaining motors and jumped to the nearest ledge, found a door and forced it open.

#

She exited out into a grimy corridor, more like an access passageway. No one was there but through the next set of doors she found people, doctors and nurses, sick patients holding their heads, or curled up on examination tables, trying to sleep. The walls looked dirty, and the ceiling was marred with water stains. No one paid her any attention, and so she slipped into a laundry, found a fresh jumpsuit and made her way to a set of stairs that took her upward.

At the top of her climb, she found two patrolling security drones that aimed their weapons at her and demanded identification before the hacking devices she'd tossed at them did their work. When they'd let her through there were several sets of security doors, and finally a guard who looked alert, but was easily distracted when Ashana reprogrammed her cameras.

One last set of doors that also required forcing, and then she entered into the building's massive main lobby, a massive, light filled space, with terraces and balconies and hanging gardens that rose some fifteen levels above the main entrance. The main gallery was tall enough that the ceiling nearly disappeared in the mist that hovered high above.

Residences lined one side of the interior of the tower. A group of children, wearing school uniforms and walking in perfectly neat lines followed their teacher across the main floor toward the entrance to their school, while nearby valets in livery hurried to serve those arriving at the tower. Outside, a massive landing pad, where vehicles of all sorts were breaking from the traffic pattern to land. Through the picture windows, she saw the setting sun glimmering off the glass and stone of perhaps a hundred more such towers. Up here. Down there. This tower, Ashana thought, is built on a foundation of bones. Her geth said nothing in response. The sight of it, after what she'd seen below, just a few hours earlier, filled her with a sort of rage, the ignorance of these people who went about their lives, without a care for what was going on beneath their feet. But there was nothing she could do about it.

Several days had passed since the crash, and she suddenly realized she hadn't eaten since the attack on the freighter.

When she'd eaten, and exchanged her hospital jumpsuit for more suitable clothing, bought from an automated stand a few levels higher, she boarded another elevator for the upper levels.

_Where are we going?_ her geth asked. I don't know, Ashana thought. I don't know, but we have to get out of here.


	7. Chapter 7: Old Metal

Old Metal

21 Monsoon, 215 New Quarian Calendar (6 April, 2401 Galactic Standard)

Rainy season on Rannoch. All over the countryside, the downpour was stretching into its fourth day, filling the wadis that drained into the Merkahan river run with whitewater. Where the river split the city in half, it ran thick with orange mud and debris, same as it did every Monsoon.

But in the narrow covered alleys off the old market of Merkahan Souk, the poorly kept glass roof only leaked, making the gutter in the street fill with a little rivulet of dirty water. Ashana was squatting in front of her rented stall, bins of scrap arrayed on the floor behind her, watching the rain trickle along the groove in the floor toward a drain, where her alleyway met another.

She wasn't the only ragpicker in the district. She wasn't even the only one in that alley, but she was the only non-geth. The only thing that kept her alive was that her scrap was slightly cheaper than the stuff going down the way, and the legged platforms that came her way understood the difference between a working servo for four credits, versus one for three, and she always sold for three.

A gust of wind blew down the alley, and the sound of rain on the glass above increased. The air that came down the alley was cool, almost a relief for the usually stagnant air that abounded under the roof.

Around noon, feeling hungry, and having sold some scraps of decorative ceramic plating to a platform that had come looking for a knee joint, Ashana decided to head out into the market, leaving her own geth to run the shop, while she went to New Market.

Ashana had had a good few months. She'd recently been able to afford eating every other day, and even at her far end of the Souk, she could already smell the crisp skin of the river snake, roasting on spits in the stalls on the far end of New Market. Today it was too much to resist the expense.

Even so, she couldn't throw caution to the wind. Her alley was narrow, and she could see trouble coming, if it ever came, but venturing beyond her neighborhood meant being careful. The next alley ended in a bigger passageway. Stopping in a niche in the wall just at the head of the alleyway, she peered out into the street. The warren of tight alleyways that Ashana called home was but one subdistrict of a larger area known as Old Metal. It had been built before the Morning War, and the geth had decided to leave alone during their long occupation. After the joining, New Market had been built on the other side of the river, fancy shops and restaurants, a kind of destination that someone had imagined would be enough like the Wards on the Citadel to satisfy the restless quarian spirit.

Normandy Prospect tied all the smaller neighborhoods of Old Metal together. The place earned its name because on a hillside not far from here, _the _Commander Shepard had beaten a reaper in single combat. The reaper, or its corpse, as they called it, lay in the flats down by the river for nearly a century, while the city grew up around it, until finally someone had come in and smelted the hulk, casting the metal into cubes that sat arranged on pedestals all through the old market, and that gave the place its odd name. Ashana's geth told her that the rust-colored cubes still sang with dark music when the hot winds blew out of the south.

#

It had been nearly ten years since she'd last used the name Ashana. Ilium had been a hard place, but there's always work for a tinker, even one whose stomach cramped and who spent an hour a day bent over in pain. And so she'd indentured herself to a household, a pureblood family, strivers, who wanted to climb above their mid-tower lives into the upper decks of Ilium society. She'd spent six years teaching their children about math, electronics, robotics, while their mothers stood on, watching the strange quarian with the pretty face and the clever hands, she who limped always, who often walked bent over, as though broken at the waist.

The asari mistresses were odd about her ailments, always asking impertinent questions, their curiosity both genuine and morbid and thoroughly un-quarian. Ashana had nodded and smiled, and saved what little she earned on the side, fixing, modding, anything for a few credits for her to stash somewhere. When she'd made enough, she paid for a new identity, and slipped away while her mistresses and their children slept.

Her family thought she had died with Shen and the rest on Lorek. A year ago, the Rannoch news had reported from the site of the massacre, running an hour-long episode they'd called _The Lost Crew. _Not many, aside from Ashana actually knew what had happened on Lorek, and of the few that did—the perpetrators, Liara T'Soni and her crew, Ashana herself—none were either willing or able to talk about the incident. The reporter, standing in front of the Anthill, site of the massacre, could only speculate on the reasons for the attack. Ashana could have told him but it would bring no one any comfort to say that it had all been a mistake of sorts, that they'd simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. It didn't make Shen any less dead, or make her love him less, even though he'd turned her away and threatened though never quite made good on his promise to kick her off the ship.

When she'd come home to Rannoch, she'd been a different person. By then she'd been away from home for eight years, two on the _Vesta_ and six more on Ilium, and her family had, in their own way, resigned themselves to having lost their daughter. Ashana had gone to see them, from a distance, when she'd first arrived. Her father looked old, clutching her mother's arm as they made their way down the street to the shop where they'd worked for decades, taking on extra work to pay her way offworld, to pay for the pilgrimage she would never finish.

She might as well have died on Lorek. You can't go home as an unfinished girl, she knew, and her family couldn't afford for her to live forever at home. Her unfinished status suited her. Everything abut it made sense. She was hardly the only unfinished girl working in the alleyways of the Merkahan, though probably she was the only one selling scrap.

#

Her geth sang numbers in her head. She was hungry, and they wanted her to move on_, We live by your life_, they often said, and so she stepped out into the foot traffic. No one noticed her, whisper thin, face hidden in the folds of her hood, her clever hands clutching the cane she needed just as often as a weapon as she did for mobility.

And yet—it was possible she was being watched.

Two weeks earlier, she had seen a turian in the market. Turians were hardly uncommon on Rannoch. At times there were entire regiments of them, come to train with the Rannoch Defense Forces, joint exercises whose purpose Ashana had never quite understood. But they didn't often come on holiday, and when they did, the never came alone.

This one had the military bearing—most of the turians she'd ever seen did—but he didn't have the gear, and he was by himself. The week before, she'd spent the day away from her stall, watching remotely from a nearby alleyway to see if he happened by. He didn't, but that didn't mean anything. So she'd spent another day, following him. _The Hierarchy remembers_, she thought. No: _The Hierarchy will never forget_.

He was about her age, so around thirty, and he walked with the slow confidence of someone who had been wounded in battle and was now making a show of how well they were bearing up under it, and no you didn't need to ask, no really he was fine. There was a prominent scar on his face, covered with a flesh graft and a piece of metal, that distorted some of the markings, inverted chevrons over the nose and something on the chin, which she read as being from one of the older turian colonies, though she couldn't quite tell which.

She followed him at a distance, watching, when she could, from security cameras. _He might anticipate our actions_, her geth told her, given that most of the cameras on Rannoch were public, because the locals would only hack them anyhow. In time she'd gained eyes nearly everywhere. And the turian, Brutus, she'd taken to calling him, showed no interest in looking over his shoulder, or watching the crowds for familiar faces. Instead he went from place to place, haggling with the men and women who oversaw the stalls in the dye and cloth market, and eating, fairly regularly at the Fishdog Shack, which was not far from his hotel, on the far side of New Market.

For a day or two, she'd been sketching out a plan on how to find him there. Or better yet, find him away, break into his pod and have a look at what he was carrying, but it was only now as stood at the head of the alleyway, barely wider than her outstretched arms, that she thought she might put it into action. She stopped at the entrance to Normandy Prospect, watching the feeds for a lurking Brutus.

Nothing out of the ordinary: quarians by the hundred, marching up and down the stalls on the avenue, an asari walking with a krogan, holding hands, not bodyguard and VIP, though there was another krogan guarding someone, probably the bagman who made the rounds to the valuables shops on the opposite end of the street. Ashana made her way into the crowd, bent, but not too hard, and leaning on her stick even when she didn't need it, nearly invisible, she thought, quarians not wanting to look too hard at an unfortunate, lest they become one, too.

Ashana hurried best she could along Normandy Prospect, walking with the flow of foot traffic, until she reached the New Market Bridge. The souk's roof opened at the crossing, and she took a moment to glance up at where away from the inland sea, the city had grown like a forest out of the low hills, kilometer-tall towers that, today, vanished into the bellies of the clouds.

She was over the bridge and well across the outer courtyard of New Market proper before she realized the danger. Old Metal was her territory. No one would pay an urchin any mind there, but here she drew stares, like she should have been begging for alms. So she did, setting herself up at the base of a column by one of the busier sidestreets. It was a good place to watch the traffic circulating down the hill and into the New Market Square. She earned more begging in an hour than she had all week.

Ashana was beginning to think she might have two skewers of riversnake instead of just one when she saw her mark flowing down the hill, his head floating above the quarians, who were by and large a hand's breadth or two shorter than an average turian.

She gathered up her things and slipped out of New Market Square, circling toward the base of the hill, to see if she could catch a glimpse of him. Her plan, though, was hampered somewhat by New Market itself, too many fancy shops where she knew she wouldn't be welcome, too many alleyways that ended in loading docks, and connected to nothing. She knew her way around well enough, but she'd never had to hurry before. And she was hungry, not at her best as a reasoning being, and so she realized after some minutes of frantic movement, that she had been following the scent of food, wafting in from somewhere, instead of the best possible way to find her target.

By the time she reached the square again, Brutus was on the far side, long gone, and headed in the direction of Old Metal. Well, that suited her plans, and so she turned the other way, up the hill in the direction of his hotel.

It was on the far side of New Market, about as far away from Old Metal as you could get without leaving the Souk proper. The building itself was a modular pod, flat front and sides, made of metal sections bolted together. Inside were pods, usually for short stay business travelers, and for the exceptionally frugal long-stay visitor.

She quickly found the area where his pod was located, then stepped back, circling to look for an empty pod she could hide in if she got cornered. She found three, two in an adjacent row, and one more in the next. Returning to the turian's pod, she picked the lock and slid back the opening.

The pod was empty, a fresh towel and soap laid out just so, fresh sheets, and made up as though it were ready for the next occupant Ashana reached in and felt under the blanket. Nothing. She felt in the panels overhead, and again came up empty. The storage compartments were sealed shut. And there was a little dust on some of the surfaces, so the pod hadn't been cleaned for a while. She scanned for cameras or other recording devices, and found nothing, crawled inside, feeling the pillow, not quite sure what she was looking for, when her hand closed, suddenly, on a compact pistol, tucked into the lining of the mattress pad. She put it in her pocket and was going to continue looking, when then there were footseps padding down the central aisle.

She retreated back to her vacant pod. Two men, not talking and perhaps not even walking together, came her way, before heading off in the direction of the turian's pod. Their footsteps stopped, and she heard a hatch slide open. One of the men muttered something, and the other chuckled. She waited as they slid their door panels shut and got settled. She spent the next hour scarcely breathing. There were no public cameras in this part of the hotel, or they were broken. She lay quiet, while another hour ticked by.

It was evening now, and many of the guests had returned, young businessmen who had been out drinking with their colleagues, one or two families, and more than a few women traveling with small children. Everyone was making noise, and she used the commotion to help slip out of her pod. Her joints had gone stiff while lying down, and she limped more than usual as she tried to blend in.

Even here she was a little too dirty not to stand out. She put her shawl over her head and kept her head down. The stairwell and relative safety were only a few meters ahead of her now, but then one of the drunk men grabbed her, with a loud _Hey, bunny_, and pull her toward his pod. She jabbed him in the stomach with her stick, and when he cried out, threw herself toward the doorway, stumbling down the first few steps.

He didn't follow her, nor did anyone else. She moved downward, one floor, two, now only one left to go before she was at the main entrance and then back out into the Souk, where she could disappear. She'd nearly made it to the exit, when a strong hand clapped onto her shoulder and spun her around.

"Looking for someone?" the turian said. His face looked more threatening in the dark of the stairs, and his eyes were a cold, hard shade of blue. Without realizing she'd done it, she had drawn the pistol and shoved it into his ribs.

He grunted and looked down. She jabbed the gun in harder and he let her go.

Ashana stepped back from him, leveling the pistol now. His mandibles flicked, tense, but not quite afraid. In the dark of the stairs it seemed more like he was ready, for a struggle, for a fight, for death maybe. Then his face softened somehow, hard for a turian to do, with their scaled, metallic looking skin. The graft on his face looked more ad-hoc than it did at a distance.

"Put it away," he said. "I just want to talk." Ashana kept the pistol leveled. She figured she could hit him in the chest if he tried to lunge. "Fine he said," and his mandibles flicked again. "You're a long way from your rag picker's stall," he said. Her fingers flexed around the pistol's grip, but she said nothing. "What brings you all the way out of Old Metal and over here?"

"What do you want with me?" she asked, relieved to at least be able to say her question.

He grinned. "The Heirarchy remembers," he said.

"You want your Sevnth Fleet data," Ashana whispered. "Is that what you want? Heavens you can have it. I've seen enough death already."

The turian shook his head. "You don't know who I am, do you?" Ashana squinted at him in the dark and shook her head. She lowered the pistol a little. She'd met a lot of turians on the orbital station. He was too young to be the one who had pulled her aside and said something about _out there_. No that wasn't it. "We've met before," he said.

"Where?" she asked, "Palaven?"

"The Citadel," he said. "My name is Varian."

And then it came back to her. The young turian sitting by the foot of her bed, reading something he called a spirit book. He'd said his name, and she'd been half asleep, and then all the way asleep. She'd seen him talking to Dr. T'Soni, and the surgeon, and her geth had told her he was kind, but even they, apparently, had lost the memory who he was.

"Seems you're doing better than the last time I saw you," the turian said. She let the pistol drop a little and he began to reach for it, before she shoved it back toward his face. "How's the stomach?" he said.

"What?"

He gestured. "You were in bad shape, last time I saw you."

And then: she remembered seeing him on the news, his face among the others that, along with Liara T'Soni had been dragged into Afterlife, where they had, she assumed, all been killed.

Ashana lowered the pistol again. "You—" she said, before stepping back again, like she'd seen a ghost. "I—I saw you getting dragged into Aria's nightclub on Omega," she said. "With Liara T'Soni, right before the building blew up. She died there. And so—so did you." She raised the pistol again.

"And yet," the turian said with a shrug, "here I am. And there you are. Neither of us is supposed to be alive."

Ashana lowered the pistol again. He took her hand in his and she let him ease the weapon from her grasp. "But—how did you—?"

He touched his face. "Oh they shot me. Right in the head. I thought I was going to die, for a while I wished I had, especially after they shoved me right into the waste disposal system. I don't see too well out of this eye, at least not without my cybernetics." He pocketed the pistol and sat down on the steps. A group of women came down the stairs, and Ashana backed away, but he didn't move to hide at all. When they'd gone, he said, "Relax. We're just two people talking in a stairwell." Ashana stepped a little closer and he went on, "A family of batarians who live down in the drainage system fished me out. They took me to a hospital." His gaze went far away, and then came back. He stood up straight and took her hand again. "I'm glad you're still alive. I need your help."

"You seem to be doing all right."

"Look," he said. "Maybe we should go somewhere quieter."

He led her through the back of the hotel, down an alleyway and finally out of the Souk entirely, into a neighborhood that fronted onto a wide canal. The water in the port was turning gray orange with sediment from the river. The fading daylight made the gray weather even more dismal. Barges tied up to the nearby piers creaked and groaned as they scraped their rusty metal together. Rain scoured the water and the stone pier where they were standing.

"There's no easy way to say this," he told her. "I don't think T'Soni is dead."

Ashana laughed. "You'd be the only one."

"There—there are few other people who share my opinion," he said. "But listen. Five years ago, someone came to us with an image capped from loading dock surveillance from the day an explosion ripped through Afterlife." He showed her an image of an asari, dressed in a gray overcoat, hood pulled up over her head, eyes down. She had no visible facial markings. It could have been T'Soni. It could have been anyone. There were a few other images, from other angles, each one progressively better. It was possible it was the same person.

"Turns out he'd been scouring video archives for images like this." Varian had another picture of Liara, from the video feed that showed the clothing Liara had been wearing earlier, when she'd been dragged from the shuttle into Afterlife. "It's the same." Ashana stared. It was possible. Dark pants, a lighte-colored jacket of some sort, soot black and torn. He flipped through a few more images. "Someone in our labs cleaned these up a bit, but you get the idea. Whoever this person was, she arrived at the spaceport in a nondescript vehicle, but it had some pretty serious tech inside, a medical drone, hardened comm system, armored panels, the works. And we have footage of her getting on a freighter bound for Rannoch. They don't show a record of a passenger, so likely she came ashore in a sealed compartment."

"Likely she never came ashore at all," Ashana said. She looked out at the water. The barges were only dark shapes now. "That was ten years ago. T'Soni could be anywhere."

"That's not the point," he told her. He glanced over his shoulder and then stared at her intently. Something in his face seemed to change, as though he'd decided evidence alone wasn't going to convince her. "I have a ship," he said. "I can get you out of this life. But you have to help me. You have to help me find T'Soni."

There was a throb of static from her geth. They had been quiet since she left them to mind the store. Now they had jumped back to her through a nearby extranet terminal.

"Will you help me?" he asked.

"How? I have nothing. I have no money, no resources. I can barely stand up straight when the weather changes."

_Him,_ her geth said. _He helped us. _

Varian smiled. He had worked all of this out well in advance she understood. The search that would lead her to find him, the curiosity that would drive her to abandon everything she had, little though it was, to give him aid, he who needed it less than she. He already knew he'd won, but now he had to close the deal. "I've got a friend," he said. "A reporter back on Palaven. Works for a subsidiary of Galaxy News. Big market, lots of viewers and such. She's been after this Liara T'Soni story for almost as long as I have. She doesn't know I'm in Intelligence, or that the reason she's been following the story so long is because I've been feeding her information. About two hours ago, when we saw you entering the hotel, I had a package delivered to her office. A medical file—yours—from your time on the Citadel. Your intake documents, your name, DNA from tissue samples. It's all very convincing. Because it's true."

"I don't understand," she said.

"Those files are proof that you survived Lorek. Taken together with your suspicious disappearance from Huerta Memorial weeks before your doctor thought it would be advisable to leave means something, it starts to look like a conspiracy."

"You could do all of this without my help."

"Not the next part. We need you to go public with your information. On camera so that the galaxy can see that you're alive."

Ashana's thoughts began to race. It would devastate her parents to know that she'd come home, only to avoid them for more than four years. Her family would learn she was alive, only to find out in the next moment that she was just as far beyond their reach as she was as a dead woman. And yet, to be alive again, resurrected, after all these years of living under assumed names, false identities, or simply skating by too poor and unimportant to notice, she suddenly realized how much she wanted it. To be herself again, no matter what it might cost, or what it might mean for her in the future. Unfinished, the last hand, shame of the _Vesta_, the reason her crewmates were dead. And then she thought about her last day on Palaven, the worry about where Shen had gone, then the shock of being sent away by the Hierarchy.

"I have a history with your government," she said. _You're already saying yes_, her geth whispered, and she knew they were right.

"I can fix that," Varian said. It sounded like a promise he might actually keep.

"If I go with you—" she started to say, but then realized something else. If she went, if she talked to Varian's "friend," she would never be able to leave turian space again. They would likely have to keep her hidden her for the rest of her life. "If I go—"

"You'll have to stay," Varian said. "There won't be any going back. At least not until Deniri has answered for her involvement in all this. And even then—the asari are better at the long game than anyone. We likely won't live to see how any of this plays out."

"But why?"

"You already know," Varian said. He touched the graft on the side of his face as though he were expecting to feel blood there. "Your friends died because they got in the way of her making a clean attempt on T'Soni's life. She's paid Aria several times to see Liara dead. The way you live now, all the years you spent on Ilium—yes, we know about those—everything that's happened to you, she's had some hand in it. Everything that's happened to me, she's been involved. It's time we turn the tables on her."

Her geth hummed, uncertain, perhaps wanting her to say no. She said, "All right." And then, "But if you found me, Deniri can't be far behind."

Varian nodded. "We had some help," he said. "One of Liara's associates was the one who brought us our initial information on where to find you. It's helped us keep you alive this long."

"And if I go back to my stall?"

"You can. It may be a month or a year, or five before someone comes for you, but they will come. Unless hunger does the job first."

"So I have no real choice," she said.

"I wish you did," Varian said. She looked out at the river and the bay, thinking of her time on Palaven, and of her time here on Rannoch. Saying goodbye to it forever seemed, in that moment, like the most quarian thing she could do.

"Come on," Varian said. He signaled for a car, and one pulled up almost immediately, not driven by an automated system, but piloted by two female turians, wearing light armor under their long coats, and with automatic pistols clipped to their belts.

They flew over New Market, and then Old Metal, before banking inland toward the spaceport. Within the hour, they were racing for orbit, and in another three they were approaching the relay. Someone had put a tray of food in front of her. She was surprised by how little she'd eaten.

Ashana tried to keep the tears at bay, by thinking of what she would tell the reporter, and how she would say it, once she got to Palaven. But there were no words, nothing came to her mind, as a few tears streaked down her face, and instead, she let her geth sing her an old song, called "Morning on Rannoch," which, she realized now, meant very different things to each of them. She and her geth were debating the meaning of the words when there was a change in gravity as the ship altered its vector to line up with the relay. _Ten minutes_, said their pilot.

_We'll be back_, her geth whispered.

Ashana shook her head. No, she thought.

"Something wrong?" Varian asked.

"No," she said, "I just had a chill."

"All right, then," he said. "We need to get you briefed and prepped." He gestured to one of his colleagues, a female turian whose name wasn't Minerva, but something like it. The two of them went into a private cabin in the ship, and closed the door behind them. She had a friendly face, and a pistol loaded with radioactive ammunition in her holster.

She gestured for Ashana to sit. There was a camera rig, unobtrusive but still there, off to the side. There was a table, and glasses of water, and a series of documents open on a reader interface nearby. The turian sat across from Ashana and gave her an intense look from her oddly friendly turian face.

"Ashana nar Vesta," she said. "You've been out in the cold for a long time. It's time for you to come back in. It's my job to make sure you understand what you're getting into."

Ashana nodded and folded her hands in her lap. Her stomach ached and so did her back. She couldn't imagine her situation getting worse than what it had been. It couldn't, could it? Of course it could. There was only one way for it to stop getting worse. As long as she was alive, as long as she stayed alive her situation could always change. Better that, she thought. _Better that_, her geth answered as the relay caught hold of the ship and hurled it across the galaxy, toward Palaven.


End file.
